Littoral books: archiving oceanic memory through pressed and printed plants

Abstract

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.