ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Josiah McElheny is an artist living in New York. Christine Burgin is a publisher of books on art and literature.

REVIEWS

“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.”

— Sean Keller, Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture

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

— Lynne Tillman, author of What Would Lynne Tillman Do?

“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 . . .”

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

“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.”

— San Francisco Book Review

“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.”

— Karrie Jacobs, Architect

“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."

— Choice

“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.”

— Apollo

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Josiah McElheny and Christine Burgin

Christopher Turner

Paul Scheerbart | Translated by James Palmes
Illustrated by Josiah McElheny

Paul Scheerbart | Translated by Anne Posten

Bruno Taut | Translated by Anne Posten

Noam M. Elcott

Bruno Taut | Translated by Anne Posten

Rosemarie Haag Bletter

Paul Scheerbart | Translated by Anne Posten and Laura Lindgren

Selected and introduced by Bruno Taut

Hollyamber Kennedy

Gary Indiana

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

Perpetual Motion: The Story of an Invention

Paul Scheerbart | Translated by Susan Bernofsky

Illustrated by Paul Scheerbart and Josiah McElheny

Paul Scheerbart

Guy Maddin

Hubertus von Amelunxen | Translated by Anne Posten

Anselm Ruest | Translated by Anne Posten

Translated by Anne Posten

Hubertus von Amelunxen | Translated by Anne Posten

Text and images by Paul Scheerbart | Translated by Anne Posten

Josiah McElheny

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