On the occasion of Jean Paul's 250th birthday on March 21, 2013. In thirty-seven large boxes lies the estate of Jean Paul: a sea of unpublished notes. Acquired in 1888 by the Prussian State Library for a thousand thalers, it was stored away during World War II, then went missing, reappeared in Moscow, and was returned in 1958. Today, it is in the care of philologists working on the comprehensive historical-critical edition of Jean Paul. With generous permission from the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and the Weimar Böhlau Publishing House, a selection from the forty thousand pages of this vast collection is made accessible here. "Remarks on Us Foolish People," "Building Blocks," "Satire and Irony," "Memoranda," "Books of Inventions": this is how these records are titled. So what is it then? All sorts of things, just not neatly combed maxims or aphorisms for wisdom in life – rather, a flourishing jumble of ideas, observations, sketches, parables... A "Milky Way of Ideas," as Lichtenberg, that other great outsider, left behind in his Sudelbücher. Jean Paul, known as Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763-1825), was possessed by an irresistible urge to note, write, and scribble. He calls it his "ink fondness," and he compares his work to the metabolism of Vaucanson's duck, the most famous automaton of the eighteenth century. The classic as a thought-breeding machine: this is an idea that seems to fit better in the twenty-first century.