THE ARCADES PROJECT

Second printing (same year as the first). Original pictorial boards, quarter-bound in black cloth lettered in blue to the spine, in the dustwrapper designed by Gwen Nefsky Franfeldt with raised blue and gilt foil lettering. From the library of the Philip Larkin scholar and biographer, James Booth, former Professor of English at the University of Hull, his pencilled name to the half title. A fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. A little shelf dust to the lower outer edge of the page block. In the fine, unclipped dustwrapper. A clean, sharp copy.

"Conceived in Paris In 1927 and still in progress in 1940 when Benjamin fled the Nazis, only to find death on the Spanish border, 'The Arcades Project' is his magnum opus: a new theory of history embodied in a new literary and philosophical historiography. With greater concreteness than had ever been achieved in historical narrative, Benjamin's text immerses the reader in the milieu of the Paris arcades—those precursors of today's shopping malls—during the period 1830-1870, when the modern industrial world was taking shape." (from the jacket). "[A] treasure hoard of curious information about Paris, a multitude of thought-provoking questions, the harvest of an acute and idiosyncratic mind's trawl through thousands of books, succinct observations, [...] The Arcades [Project], whatever our verdict on it – ruin, failure, impossible project – suggests a new way of writing about a civilisation using its rubbish as materials rather than its artworks: history from below rather than above. And his call elsewhere for a history centred on the sufferings of the vanquished, rather than on the achievements of the victors, is prophetic of the way in which history writing has begun to think of itself in our lifetime." (J. M. Coetzee, The Guardian, 20 January 2001).