Plants, Water, Salt, Coal: The Archival Strata of the Victorian Photographic Book

This essay interprets the special issue’s theme, “Bibliophilia: Book Matters” through the curious and interconnected bodies of 19th-century books and plants: more specifically, the experimental photographic book objects inspired by Pteridomania, or “Fern Craze,” a collecting fad hinging on the desire for ferns in prehistoric and contemporary forms. Botanical collecting is typically figured as an extractive process that removes living plants from their native environs, placing them within the dried, enclosed spaces of different books objects, ranging from institutional herbarium to domestic albums. Tapping into the preservative potentials of ecological extraction, I argue that the photographic book advances a model of botanical collecting that memorializes, rather than effaces, these environs of the extracted plants. Taking Cecilia Glaisher’s photographic book, The British Ferns (1855), as my primary subject, I map out processes of photographic creation, focusing on the material condition of Glaisher’s prints and their composition techniques, to demonstrate how different environmental milieux write themselves into and linger unseen within Glaisher’s book: the “wild states” of England’s fern collecting cultures, Glaisher’s own regional ecosystem of Kent, and finally England’s deep-time stratigraphic layers. To access these spaces and times, my readings advance a theoretical framework that entwines eco-materialisms, media studies, and book history through their shared interest in more-than-human storytelling. In simultaneously preserving vegetal, geological, and human histories, the photographic book forms a multi-layered node of Victorian environmental thought that recognizes how extractive ecologies challenge standard, human-centered histories of the book.