Kleine Welt examines the visual and semantic life of the book cover, focusing on the recurring use of images by Caspar David Friedrich and Paul Klee in academic publishing.

At its center is the question of how certain artworks are repeatedly mobilized to frame intellectual content and how, through repetition, they acquire a second life as carriers of association, authority, and cultural meaning.

By gathering covers that reproduce Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog and annotating covers that feature works by Klee, the volume shifts attention from the singular artwork to its circulation, reuse, and transformation in print culture. What emerges is a study of the book cover not as a neutral wrapper, but as a site where images are selected, coded, and made to speak in relation to scholarship, taste, and institutional habit.

The publication brings together texts by writers, artists, and philosophers, alongside original contributions by contemporary artists. In doing so, it approaches the book cover as both an interpretive surface and a cultural form in its own right, shaped by citation, projection, and repetition.