Paul Scheerbart (born in Danzig in 1863) was a prolific writer and prominent participant in several successive German avant-gardes during the formative years of Modernism, from Decadence to early Dada. He lived an impoverished and inebriated life in Berlin and died in 1915.

Among M. Kasper’s translations are The Subversion of Images by Paul Nougé (Wakefield Press), Ideas Have No Smell: Three Belgian Surrealist Booklets (UDP), The Development of Aerial Militarism by Paul Scheerbart (UDP), and Saint Ghetto of the Loans by Gabriel Pomerand (with Bhamati Viswanathan; UDP). Kasper — who was born in the Bronx (1947), lived overseas for some years, and worked as a librarian for many at Amherst College in western Massachusetts — has also published a dozen artists books, including All Cotton Briefs (2nd ed., Benzene & the Xeric Foundation), Billy! Turn Down That TV! (Diana’s Bimonthly), Plans for the Night (Benzene), The Shapes and Spacing of the Letters (2nd ed., highmoonoon & the London Institute of ‘Pataphysics), Open-Book (UDP), and Kirghiz Steppes: Accumulated Verbo-Visuals  (Black Scat). As Christopher Middleton once said, “A Kasper a day keeps the moodles away.”