Now everything indicates that the book in this traditional form is nearing its end.
Mallarmé, who in the crystalline structure of his certainly traditionalist writing saw the true image of what was to come, was in the Coup de dés the first to incorporate the graphic tensions of the advertisement in the printed page. The typographical experiments later undertaken by the Dadaists stemmed, it is true, not from constructive principles but from the precise nervous reactions of these literati, and were therefore far less enduring than Mallarmé's, which grew out of the inner nature of his style.
But they show up for this very reason the topicality of what Mallarmé, monadically, in his hermetic room, had discovered through a pre-established harmony with all the decisive events or our times in economics, technology, and public life.
excepts from Walter Benjamin One-Way Street
