'Dreaming in Books' picked among Best Art Books of the Year

Assistant Professor Andrew Piper's new book, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age, (University of Chicago Press) was recently chosen by The New Republic as one of the Best Art Books of the Year. "Andrew Piper has written a book about the nineteenth century’s romance with books, looking at the many ways in which the physical character of a book and its illustrations shaped a reader’s avidity. Piper’s scholarly history is fueled by a bookish ardor—you can feel the love that went into his footnotes. This writer’s thinking comes straight out of the long afternoons he must have spent in the library, pulling book after book off the shelves, experiencing the power not only of words but also of bindings, typefaces, and illustrations."