Participatory Event / “The Book Handling Agency: The Berlin Session,” with Michel Chaouli, Jeff Dolven, Merve Emre, Eva Geulen, Tom McCarthy, and company

Date: 12 July 2026, 6:30–8:30 pm
Location: Books of Others, back room of Barettino Bar, Reuterstr. 59, 12047 Berlin (map)
Free. No RSVP necessary. Cash payments only for book-handling services
Hosted by our friends at Books of Others

Please join us for an evening with New York’s fabled Book Handling Agency, an organization whose roster of scholars and writers have been trained to transform your unread books into artifacts that will stand as monuments to your cultural erudition and discernment.

The agency brings to life Irish author Flann O’Brien’s 1941 satirical proposal for a service that would make any unread book appear as if “its owner has practically lived, supped, and slept with it for many months.” O’Brien imagined that the service would be of most value to wealthy people who have purchased large numbers of books in order to appear well-read. But we, of course, know that every library contains books that, despite best intentions, have not been—and, perhaps, never will be—read.

The Book Handling Agency is your one-stop solution to this dilemma. Bring an unread book from your library, and let our expert book handlers not only distress it outwardly but also add internal signs of devoted reading, ranging from judicious underlining to marginalia so clever that you will be eager to lend it to friends. Your professionally handled book will broadcast intellectual acumen for the rest of your life, and down through the ages.

New York City is home to so many unread books that the agency is rarely able to bring its invaluable services to other locations. This once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in Berlin is not to be missed. Others in the team include Hunter Dukes, Emma Fenton, Clara Hartley, Isadora McCarthy, Sina Najafi, Lio Olsen, and Meryem Özel.

Please consult the below price list for both à la carte handling and cost-saving package options. The agency will donate all proceeds from this event to the non-profit publisher Cabinet, who have housed the agency gratis at their Brooklyn headquarters since its inception.

The agency also offers private book handling sessions. Inquiries should be directed to thebookhandlingagency@immaterial.net.

PRICES
Kindly note that the agency can only accept cash when abroad.

PACKAGES
All packages include complimentary marking with agency seal

Essential Handling Package: €5 (40% discount)
Includes professional breaking of spine; 2 commonplace page markers; 2 scholastic dog-ears; 4 underlined passages; 1 arbitrary yet discerning piece of marginalia; and 1 contextually appropriate piece of marginalia

Premier Handling Package: €8 (45% discount) 
Includes multicreasing the spine and and mauling the edges; 1 stain using cheap wine, coffee, etc.; 2 culturally sophisticated page markers; 4 scholastic dog-ears; 4 underlined passages; 1 arbitrary yet discerning piece of marginalia, and 2 contextually appropriate pieces of marginalia

Deluxe Handling Package: €10 (50% discount) 
Includes multicreasing the spine and and mauling the edges; 1 stain using cheap wine, coffee, etc.; 2 culturally sophisticated page markers; 6 scholastic dog-ears; 6 underlined passages; 2 contextually appropriate pieces of marginalia; 1 custom scholarly piece of marginalia

Superb Handling Package: €15 (55% discount)
Includes multicreasing the spine and and mauling the edges; 1 stain using expensive wine, absinthe, etc.; 2 culturally sophisticated page markers; 8 scholastic dog-ears; 8 underlined passages; 2 contextually appropriate pieces of marginalia; 3 custom scholarly pieces of marginalia; 1 forged message of affection and gratitude from the author

Student Handling Package: €5 (65% discount)
Includes professional breaking of spine; 1 stain using cheap wine, coffee, etc.; 2 scholastic dog-ears; 4 underlined passages; 2 contextually appropriate pieces of marginalia; and 2 custom scholarly pieces of marginalia

About the Participants
Michel Chaouli teaches German and comparative literature at Indiana University. He is the author of The Laboratory of Poetry: Chemistry and Poetics in the Work of Friedrich Schlegel (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002; German translation 2004), Thinking with Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Harvard University Press, 2017), and Something Speaks to Me: Where Criticism Begins (The University of Chicago Press; German translation forthcoming).

Jeff Dolven teaches poetry and poetics at Princeton University. He is the author of Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (The University of Chicago Press, 2007), Senses of Style: Poetry Before Interpretation (The University of Chicago Press, 2018), and the admittedly hasty Take Care (Cabinet Books, 2017), as well as two books of poems, Speculative Music (Sarabande, 2013) and *A New English Grammar (Dispersed Holdings, 2022). He is an editor-at-large at Cabinet.

Merve Emre teaches creative writing and criticism at Wesleyan University and directs the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. She is the author of The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing (Doubleday, 2018), Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (The University of Chicago Press, 2018), and The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism (Columbia University Press, 2020). She is currently completing Post-Discipline: Two Futures for Literary Study and writing a new book, Love and Other Useless Pursuits.

Eva Geulen is professor of German literature at the Humboldt University in Berlin and director of the Leibniz-Institute for Literary and Cultural Research. Her most recent publications have been on the Frankfurt School and on Goethe’s studies on morphology.

Tom McCarthy is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theater, and radio. In 2013, he was a recipient of a Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction in the award’s inaugural year. His books include Remainder (Metronome Press, 2005), Tintin and the Secret of Literature (Granta, 2006), C (Knopf and Jonathan Cape, 2010), Satin Island (Knopf and Jonathan Cape, 2015), and The Making of Incarnation (Knopf and Jonathan Cape, 2021). His new novel, The Rhyl Poster (New York Review Books and Jonathan Cape 2026), will appear this fall.