Kompilation, Transformation, Edition. Alexander von Humboldts Kleinere Schriften (1853) als Polygraphie.

For a long time, the editorial presentation of Alexander von Humboldt’s œuvre did not do justice to its significance. Only after the publication of the collected papers, articles and essays (2019/21) has it become possible to assess the transformations between his non-book publications and his larger works: Humboldt’s books emerged from his smaller writings and his contributions to journals and periodicals. They were often not conceived as autonomous monographs but were made up of various elements that the author processed in fragmentary and polyphonic forms into polygraphs. Based on this conception of his transformative method of writing and publishing, Humboldt’s Kleinere Schriften, a self-curated collection of his own texts, can now be edited for the first time, complementing the first volume, published in 1853, with the second, whose unpublished manuscripts and proofs are preserved in Berlin and Krakow as well as in the archive of his publisher Cotta in Marbach.