“This is a highly ambitious, original account of Stéphane Mallarmé’s lifelong engagement with the book and the vast network of forces (cultural, aesthetic, political) that both informed this engagement and were transformed by it. Anna Sigrídur Arnar seamlessly brings together divergent areas of inquiry in order to support the idea that the book was and remains a site of numerous debates about democracy, public and private space, the uses of art and print, and the role of authors and readers. The Book as Instrument is elegantly written, in engaging and highly readable prose. Arnar succeeds in presenting and analyzing with remarkable lucidity ideas that many of us have learned to approach as difficult and thus nearly off-limits. This will be an important work of scholarship for a variety of disciplines.”

“This is a significant and substantial book about a figure of major importance in the history of avant-garde poetry, culture, and the arts. Combining substantive research with highly refined and original arguments about Mallarmé’s work and its relationship to mass culture, The Book as Instrument expertly discusses how book culture came into being in fin-de-siècle France. Filled with rock-solid scholarship, Anna Sigrídur Arnar’s analysis uncovers in lucid, descriptive prose a cultural history that has long been bracketed out of most discussions. Delightful, engaging, and impressive, this book will be important to literary scholars, art historians, and students of book history alike.”

“Arnar convincingly argues that [Mallarmé] both informed, and was informed by, the transformation of printmaking and book culture to a much greater extent than has been previously acknowledged. . . . Provides a unified and more authentic view of fin-de-siècle culture.”

“Arnar’s study is exemplary. . . . The clear and engaging prose makes her argument easily accessible to interested readers. In addition the book boasts an impressive unity of content and design. At a time when the ‘death of print’ is postulated with regularly and university presses struggle with funding, Arnar’s book is a sight for sore eyes.”

“Arnar delivers a tour de force focusing on the cultural importance of the book to the development of 19th-century modernism. . . . Highly recommended.”

 “Bracingly original. . . . . [Anna Sigridur Arnar’s] wide-ranging, lucid analyses illuminate Mallarmé’s poetic practice and offer richly formulated insights into the period’s visual culture. . . . Arnar has succeeded in writing a highly refined intervention in the history of visual culture.”

 “This masterful book will be a historical milestone not only studies of Mallarmé but also in the history of the book.” 

“As a book which is itself exceptionally well-crafted in its written language and beautifully designed with a rich array of colour and black and white images, Arnar’s study will make a major contribution to the fields of French literary symbolism, art history, and printmaking in the nineteenth century. She brings Mallarmé’s views on the book to life via critically perceptive research and an extremely engaging range of materials so that the supposedly conflicting manifestations of Mallarmé’s ideal Book as at once a work of art, a performance, and a newspaper are resolved through the underlying unifying idea of the democratization and diversification of readership opening up a creative space for interpretation through new forms of publication in the future.”