Le Livre

Throughout the last thirty years of his life, French poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842 – 1889) was engaged with a “wonderful work,” that he simply called The Book (Le Livre). He envisioned The Book as a cosmic text-architecture: an extremely flexible structure that would reveal nothing short of “all existing relations between everything.” This “Grand Oeuvre,” wholly freed from the subjectivity of its author and containing the sum of all books was, for Mallarmé, the essence of all literature and at the same time a “very ordinary” book. The realization of this “pure” work that he planned to publish in a bestseller edition never progressed beyond its conception and a detailed analysis of structural and material questions relating to publication and presentation. Yet to Mallarmé, The Book, which was to found the “true cult of the modern era,” was by no means a failure. “It happens on its own,” he explained of The Book’s unique action in one of his final statements.“ -- printedmatter.org