Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!!

A Paul Scheerbart Reader

Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! (High Resolution)

Edited by Josiah McElheny and Christine Burgin

Cloth $40.00 ISBN: 9780226203003 Published October 2014

E-book $10.00 to $40.00 About E-books ISBN: 9780226203140 Published October 2014

German writer, critic, and theorist Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915) died nearly a century ago, but his influence is still being felt today. Considered by some a mad eccentric and by others a visionary political thinker in his own time, he is now experiencing a revival thanks to a new generation of scholars who are rightfully situating him in the modernist pantheon.

Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! is the first collection of Scheerbart’s multifarious writings to be published in English. In addition to a selection of his fantastical short stories, it includes the influential architectural manifesto Glass Architecture and his literary tour-de-force Perpetual Motion: The Story of an Invention. The latter, written in the guise of a scientific work (complete with technical diagrams), was taken as such when first published but in reality is a fiction—albeit one with an important message. Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! is richly illustrated with period material, much of it never before reproduced, including a selection of artwork by Paul Scheerbart himself. Accompanying this original material is a selection of essays by scholars, novelists, and filmmakers commissioned for this publication to illuminate Scheerbart’s importance, then and now, in the worlds of art, architecture, and culture.

Coedited by artist Josiah McElheny and Christine Burgin, with new artwork created for this publication by McElheny, Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! is a long-overdue monument to a modern master.

Table of Contents

Contents
Review Quotes

Contents

Scheerbart, The Unknowable

Josiah McElheny and Christine Burgin

The Crystal Vision of Paul Scheerbart: A Brief Biography

Christopher Turner

I GLASS ARCHITECTURE

Glass Architecture, 1914

Paul Scheerbart | Translated by James Palmes
Illustrated by Josiah McElheny

Glass Houses: Bruno Taut’s Glass Palace at the Cologne Werkbund Exhibition, 1914.

Paul Scheerbart | Translated by Anne Posten

Glass House: Cologne Werkbund Exhibition, 1914

Bruno Taut | Translated by Anne Posten

“Kaleidoscope-Architecture”:
Scheerbart, Taut, and the Glass House

Noam M. Elcott

Glass Architecture, 1921

Bruno Taut | Translated by Anne Posten

Fragments of Utopia: Paul Scheerbart and Bruno Taut

Rosemarie Haag Bletter

Glass House Letters, 1920

Paul Scheerbart | Translated by Anne Posten and Laura Lindgren

Selected and introduced by Bruno Taut

Untimely Meditations and Other Modernisms: On the Glass-Dream Visions of Bruno Taut and Paul Scheerbart

Hollyamber Kennedy

II LOVE (AND OTHER FICTIONS)
A Strange Bird: Paul Scheerbart, or The Eccentricities of a Nightingale

Gary Indiana

Selected Short Stories, 1897–1912

Paul Scheerbart | Translated by Susan Bernofsky and Anne Posten

Illustrated by Paul Scheerbart

A Trial in the Year 1901: A Novelette of the Future
The Colored Moons: A Cosmosophical Scherzo
The Love of Souls: A Spiritualistic Scene from a Novel
Atlas, the Comfortable: A Myth of Humanity
The Magnetic Mirror
Transportable Cities
The Glass Theater
An Ornament Museum
The Silent Dance of Courtly Society
The Safe: A Marriage Novelette
At the Glass Exhibition in Peking: The Old Baron’s Diary Entries

III A DREAM OF PERPETUAL MOTION

Perpetual Motion: The Story of an Invention, 1910

Paul Scheerbart | Translated by Susan Bernofsky

Illustrated by Paul Scheerbart and Josiah McElheny

Perpetual Motion: A Summary, 1910

Paul Scheerbart

The Invention: A Cinematic Tale

Guy Maddin

IV DEATH AND BEYOND

Scheerbart’s Fiftieth Birthday Party: An Interview with Egidio Marzona

Hubertus von Amelunxen | Translated by Anne Posten

On the Birth, Death and Rebirth of Dionysus: A Memorial Wreath for Paul Scheerbart’s Grave, 1919

Anselm Ruest | Translated by Anne Posten

A Letter from Bruno Taut to His Brother Max, 1915

Translated by Anne Posten

“... variants of the seemingly imperfect...”:
Thoughts on Paul Scheerbart and Walter Benjamin

Hubertus von Amelunxen | Translated by Anne Posten

The Gallery of the Beyond, 1907

Text and images by Paul Scheerbart | Translated by Anne Posten

V A LIFE IN TITLES

Novels and Novelettes, Rhetorical Essays, and Prophetic Howls: A Bibliographic Poem

Josiah McElheny

Credits
Acknowledgments

Review Quotes

Choice

“This latest installment in the ongoing English-language discovery of Scheerbart (1863–1915) is well worth purchasing for its reissue of Glass Architecture above all but also for its enthusiastic celebration of this quirky, still-surprising author. . . . Recommended."

Karrie Jacobs | Architect

“I was delighted to discover . . . the first English language compendium of Scheerbart’s work. . . . Scheerbart is well worth discovering—or rediscovering—not just because he was uncannily prescient, but because his good-natured manifestos are so at odds with those of his more famous contemporaries. Ornament in Scheerbart’s universe is never a crime. Machines are objects of fascination, but we don’t have to live in them. And most of the world’s problems can be solved simply by building walls of multicolored glass.”

San Francisco Book Review

“There’s really only one poet of architecture, and that’s Paul Scheerbart. . . . Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! is a curious hybrid of ideas, idealism, and passion, shining an overdue spotlight on a singular artistic voice.”

Apollo

“Scheerbart’s glass is iridescent, coloured, shaped; glass mosaic, glass prisms, ‘glass hair’, designed not to reflect, or to see through, but to create complex kaleidoscopic effects. The uses Scheerbart wants it put to are even more improbable and utopian, and phrased in his delightfully modest, gently insistent style. . . . Josiah McElheny’s contemporary glass artworks, spread across the text, give much more of a sense of what Scheerbart expected from the glass world.”

Lynne Tillman, author of What Would Lynne Tillman Do?

“‘Colored glass destroys all hatred at last.’ I want to think about this sentence—and Scheerbart—forever. Scheerbart invents possibility.”

Lynne Cooke, 2012–2014 Andrew W. Mellon Professor, CASVA, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

“Rarely are the obscure so richly resurrected as Scheerbart is in this dense, absorbing volume. While preserving his crystalline quirkiness it lays bare for the first time the nexus of dazzling visions, timely theories, and compulsive conjecturing that made him a singular figure in his own day and a beacon in ours . . .”

Sean Keller, Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture

“An exciting and novel project that will encourage renewed attention to the beguiling and fantastical work of Paul Scheerbart, an indispensable figure for understanding the long heritage of our technologically permeated present.”

For more information, or to order this book, please visit https://press.uchicago.edu

Architecture: Architecture--Criticism

Art: Art--General Studies

History: European History

Literature and Literary Criticism: Germanic Languages

Media Studies

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