Littoral books: archiving oceanic memory through pressed and printed plants

ABSTRACT

This article identifies a Victorian moment in the genealogy of the intellectual formation of the “book of nature” made visible through Charles Anderson’s Sea Mosses herbarium (1873) to demonstrate how the herbarium transforms the metaphorical “book of nature” into a material site of ecological archiving. To underscore the registers of ecological archiving and reading taking shape through Anderson’s album, I introduce the “littoral book.” Alluding to the shoreside littoral zones where Victorian botanists collected seaweed, the littoral book is a material-conceptual book object founded on plant-human-text interconnectivities that invites humans to dwell within the ocean and its vegetal inhabitants. I introduce theoretical interlocutors with shared investments in materiality, book history and material ecocriticism, to map out forms of botanical archiving rooted in the littoral zone’s motions and materials. To capture the timeless and historicized, the sedimentary and dynamic, the territorial and amorphous qualities of the ocean’s littoral zones, I conduct close material analyses of Anderson’s album while initiating broader acts of speculative historical reconstruction by fleshing the techniques Anderson used for creating his herbarium – including specimen mounting, arranging, and labelling. This study of Anderson’s Sea Mosses reveals how the littoral book functions as an immersive, dynamic archive of oceanic memory.

KEYWORDS:

• Archives
• botany
• book history
• ecocriticism
• critical plant studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See also Jennifer Leetsch’s contribution on Mary Seacole’s Black Atlantic pharmacopoeia in this special issue.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ann Garascia

Ann Garascia is a lecturer in English at California State University, San Bernardino. She is currently working on a research project tracing continuities between Victorian cryptogamic botanical archiving and contemporary biodiversity informatics. Her articles on Victorian and contemporary archives in their many forms appear in Victorian Literature and Culture, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Journal of Victorian Culture, and other venues.