Walter Benjamnin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs

The works of the great literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin are a reservoir of texts, commentaries, scraps and fragments of everyday life, arts and dreams. This beautifully designed book, produced in association with the Benjamin Archive, gives an insight into Benjamin’s habits of collecting and archiving through some of his most personal documents. From notebooks in which every conceivable space is covered with handwriting, and a heartfelt traveller’s series of postcards, to a sequence of Benjamin’s own photographs, and lists that include a collection of his son Stefan’s early words and sentences, this wonderful collection testifies to Benjamin’s complex and kaleidoscopic passion for the ephemera of human life.

“The most important German aesthetician and literary critic of the twentieth century.” — George Steiner

Praise for The Arcades Project

“A towering literary event.” — New York Times

“A gold mine of insights and apercus.” — Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Benjamin is important because of his insight into the cultural consequences of capitalism, an insight that gives us a style of thinking aboput the now inescapable culture of consumerism.” — Harper’s

Walter Benjamin was born in Germany in 1892 and died in Spain in 1940. His other books include Illuminations, The Arcades Project, and, with Verso, One-Way Street and The Origin of German Tragic Drama.