Nowadays we already have books about books and descriptions of descriptions.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799), the German physicist and satirist, is best known for his posthumously published notebooks (the “Sudelbücher”), a running record of aphorisms and observations on science, literature, and intellectual fashion in the late Enlightenment. The remark about “books about books” reflects his recurring impatience with secondhand learning, pedantry, and the growth of commentary that can eclipse direct engagement with primary works. In Lichtenberg’s era, the expansion of print culture and scholarly apparatus—reviews, compendia, abstracts, and learned disputation—made it increasingly possible to be “well read” in summaries and meta-discourse rather than in the works themselves.

The line is a concise satire on cultural self-referentiality: instead of producing new knowledge or art, people increasingly produce commentary on commentary—“descriptions of descriptions.” Lichtenberg suggests a drift toward mediation and abstraction, where intellectual life becomes layered with paraphrase, criticism, and cataloguing. The implicit warning is that such meta-literature can substitute for firsthand experience, encouraging superficial erudition and a sense of progress without genuine discovery. Read more broadly, it anticipates modern anxieties about information overload and secondary discourse (reviews, summaries, and analyses) crowding out original thought and direct encounter with texts, events, or reality.