This work investigates how twentieth-century modernist authors utilized the material ephemera of print culture—such as wastepaper, scraps, and discarded documents—to construct new aesthetic frameworks. Joseph Elkanah Rosenberg, a scholar of modern literature and media, examines the intersection of physical print artifacts and narrative form. He argues that the modernist preoccupation with the 'waste' of the printing industry reflects a broader anxiety regarding the permanence and value of the written word in an era of mass production.

Scholars in the field of book history and modernist studies identify this text as a rigorous examination of the material conditions of literary production. Readers frequently note the academic density of the prose and the specialized focus on print media archives.