Readers who do not read a book to the end will have a hard time here. After all, every reader reads at least the beginning, and here there are no final scenes, twelfth chapters, or dramatic climaxes, but only preludes, dawns, lovely beginnings, two or three forewords, over a hundred opening chapters in color, project beginnings, letter beginnings, novel beginnings, and so on. Instead, it is all preludes, dawns, lovely beginnings, two or three prefaces, over a hundred opening chapters in color, project beginnings, letter beginnings, novel beginnings, serialized stories, first pages from photo albums and magazines. But when turning the pages, every beginning breaks off in mid-sentence. From book to book and page to page - from the intrada to the next title page and the one after that, from the opening chapter to the preface, each time an open ending - a series of promising fragments from three, four, five decades, from stage to stage, pauseless stages of development, from intermediate stage to intermediate result. In summary: a visual novel of development, a multifaceted synthesis of the arts that shows the genre-spanning, even pigeon-hole-bursting aesthete Ulrich Holbein as a narrator, draughtsman, and picture writer, as a project forger, as a rhymesmith, as a pedagogically interesting prodigy, as a comic stripper, scene changer, cultural philosopher, eco-dandy, erotomaniac, picture letter writer, and letterhead designer between many stools.