Gershom Scholem informs us that in Bern in 1919 Benjamin had on his desk Mallarme’s Un coup de des, ‘in a special quarto edition’. That volume, in various type and color, the text of which Benjamin confessed he didn’t understand, impressed upon Scholem ‘only the visual image of a pre-Dadaistic project’. Later (?) Benjamin will see in this book’s typography a prefiguration of the advertising billboard, and call Mallarme a ‘Bucherrevisor’, “someone who calls into the question the substance and the very foundation of the book and asserts that books will be replaced by some kind of file system in their mission to provide information”(Quoted in Pierre Missac, Walter Benjamin 's Passages, 30. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen).
From here.
My question is: who knows where Scholem talks about this, and where WB might discuss the poem? update: And the answer to Q2 seems to have been provided by attested auditor of books, Matt Christie.
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