PREFACE: On WordStall and “the Larger Economy of the Book”

The above phrase in inverted commas is lifted from Gabriel Josipovici, Whatever Happened to Modernism? (Yale Univ Press 2010) and suggests a city landscape into which we have now stepped back. Our old aesthetic, which we had previously called wilderness, has now also become topical, like arriving at a street kiosk. Wilderness was abstract, a theory which lacked the economy of place and activity, as the ancient Greeks would locate oikos in the topical landscape of the House of Atreus, or the City of Thebes.