Introduction: Guilty pleasures -- The conceptual landscape of luxury in Germany -- Thinking about luxury editions in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany -- The appetite for reading around 1800 -- The enlightenment novel as artifact: J.H. Campe's Robinson der Jüngere and C.M. Wieland's Der goldne Spiegel -- Karl Philipp Moritz and the system of needs -- Products of the imagination: mining, luxury, and the Romantic artist in Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen -- Symbolic economies in Goethe's Die Wahlverwandtschaften -- Conclusion: Useful subjects?