From Greek antiquity to the present, from the book to the gramophone, from Gutenberg to Google, our culture is defined by changes in recording, storage, and transmission media. In a six-volume selection of his writings, Peter Weibel presents an encyclopedia that addresses all areas of the media world. The author has conceived this series as following in the tradition of the Enlightenment and the Encyclopédie by Denis Diderot and Jean Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert. The fourth volume devises a history of literature that shows the chain of mental, formal, and mechanical elements in the production and reception of literature.

PETER WEIBEL (1944–2023) is an internationally known media and conceptual artist, curator, and art and media theoretician. Since the 1960s his work has firmly regarded artistic creativity as an open-ended field of activity. He was head of the ZKM, Karlsruhe until 2020. Since 2017 he has been director of the Peter Weibel Research Institute for Digital Culture at the Universität für angewandte Kunst in Vienna.