At Le Répetoire, a discussion of aesthetics -- Penguin's edition of Benjamin's seminal "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" versus our own, which carries the title "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" (for more on the distinction, see Samuel Weber's Benjamin's -abilities, published earlier this year). For those interested in the how's and why's of how a book design gets chosen, there's a small story behind this one. Back when The New Yorker reviewed our edition of Benjamin's ruminations on hashish, they got Ralph Steadman (of "Fear and Loathing" fame) to do a couple drawings of Benjamin to accompany the review. One of them ended up not making it into the magazine, for space reasons or some such, and when we saw it we thought it was not only cool, but quite germane to our then-forthcoming edition of the "Work of Art" essay. We got in touch with Mr. Steadman, and thus a cover was born.
||| The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media
