[...]At once representing a mysterious new aesthetic form and the apotheosis of all existing literature, Mallarmé’s dream of the Book seems impossibly ambitious, even grandiose. Yet it enchanted a whole generation of artists and writers, including André Gide, Édouard Manet, Paul Valéry, James McNeill Whistler, and Oscar Wilde, who came to listen to Mallarmé discuss this vision at the gatherings he held on Tuesday evenings at his modest apartment on the rue de Rome in Paris. And despite having only published a few slim and little read volumes of verse and prose, his contemporaries elected him “Prince of Poets” in a poll organized by the literary magazine La Plume in 1896. But no Great[...]