Michael Ende’s texts are not only explicitly designed for the medium ‚book‘, but they also use their specific book-like qualities (,bookishness‘) to tell things that are not strictly narrative in a narrower sense. In the first step, I will discuss Ende’s Die unendliche Geschichte (1979) to substantiate my theory. Then, I will address Ende’s ‚Werkpolitik‘ and try to show how the author, along with his illustrator, actualises his book-related poetics with the publisher. In a third step, the article will transfer these ideas to the field of children’s and young adult literature.