TALKING BOOKS: A NEW APPROACH TO BIBLIOFORENSICS

Summary: Bibliographers are trained in the forensics of the material book and consider every material component as a piece of evidence assembled for a ‘Crime Scene Investigation.’ But what if the books themselves could talk? How can we tell research-informed, imaginatively-inspired stories that reani-mate objects when confronted with the wholesale destruction of buil-dings, material goods and business records as a result of war? Drawing on research on the nineteenth-century book trades in Southampton, this paper enacts a new model of situated knowledges to question our current biblioforensic practices. It proposes that archival loss enables book historians to reconsider our relationship with our objects of study and opens the door to new forms of archival encounter as well as new forms of scholarly expression.

We cannot bring back to life those whom we find cast ashore in the archives. But this is not a reason to make them suffer a second death. There is only a narrow space in which to develop a story that will neither cancel out nor dissolve these lives, but leave them available so that another day, and elsewhere, another narrative can be built from their enigmatic presence.

ARLET TE FARGE 1
On the evenings of 30 November and 1 December 1940, Southampton sustained 712 aerial bombardments by German forces that destroyed much of the city's commercial heartland and industrial infrastructure. A once vibrant Victorian town was reduced overnight to craters, twisted metal, and rubble. The book trades likewise suffered along with their buildings, material goods, and business records. In this landscape of archival loss, how do we stitch together a narrative of a world now physically absent, if not virtually forgotten? Can digital interventions facilitate a new kind of storywork? The secondhand trade is rich with stories of lost treasures, silent witnesses, and perambulating books. But, as Walter Benjamin provocatively asked in 1916, 'What if things could speak? What would they tell us? Or are they speaking already and we just don't hear them?' 2 Drawing from research on the nineteenth-century book trades in Southampton, 3 this paper questions our current biblioforensic practices. It proposes that archival loss enables book historians to reconsider our relationship with our objects of study and opens the door to new forms of archival encounter as well as new forms of scholarly expression.
Set in Barcelona in 1945 as the city emerges from its war-torn past, Carlos Ruis Zafón's novel The Shadow of the Wind features a secondhand bookseller, his son, and a book. Like Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and its Piranesian shadow, a library also figures prominently: The Cemetery of Forgotten Books: A labyrinth of passageways and crammed bookshelves rose from base to pinnacle like a beehive, woven with tunnels, steps, platforms and bridges that presaged an immense library of seemingly impossible geometry [...] This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens. 4 Zafón evokes a long-established trope of the animistic book. In Thoughts on Various Subjects (1711), Jonathan Swift claimed that his books 'seemeth to be alive and talking to me.' 5 In 1678, Anne Bradstreet addressed 'Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain' 6 when she penned her poem 'The Author to her Book.' Most famously in Areopagitica (1644), that resonant homage to the liberty of unlicensed printing, John Milton wrote The idea of a book being a living, breathing thing punctuates western literature at least since the proliferation of medieval verse riddles. 8 In the field of book history, the trope is likewise alive and well. In his 1983 address to the Bibliographical Society in which he proposed a sociology of texts, D. F. McKenzie suggested that the book is 'a friskier and therefore more elusive animal than the words "physical object" will allow'. 9 Riffing on Milton's iconic phrase, Nicolas Barker edited a collection of eight essays entitled A Potencie of Life: Books in Society based on the 1986-7 William Andrew Clark Library Lectures. Notably, the volume introduced Barker and Thomas Adams' 'New Model for the Study of the Book' which revised Robert Darnton's 1982 communications circuit, shifting the focus from historical actors to functions and foregrounding the importance of historical processes, specifically transmission. 10 And yet, whether as bibliographers, historians, or literary critics, book historians continue to describe books as objects and insist on telling their academic stories in their own dispassionate, third-person voice. By so doing, do they deny a book's subjectivity, its fundamental right to life, its agency, its aliveness?
At SHARP's 2012 conference in Dublin, I started exploring models of postnational and translocal book history. By 2015, I published a new 'Situated Knowledges for Book History' model which proposed a networked, relational world to counter the ubiquitous communications circuit. 11 In the wake of popular commodity biographies and compilations of museum object stories, I wanted to interrogate similar kinds of object-oriented biblio-narratives that we as bibliographers and book historians tell. In the model's event horizon where people, places, and things meet up, I imagined a new kind of materiality that would enhance and enliven our conversations ( Figure 1).
The premise of the model is that knowledge is the product of multi-dimensional transactions between people (prosopography), places (placeography), and material records or things (bibliography) in the nexus of event horizons. This model is a research framework, a research ontology, and a research meth- odology. People acquire information either directly or indirectly in particular places, at particular times, and through particular channels. The exchange of information can be modelled as a time-stamped event shaped by the specific site of knowledge acquisition and mediated by the specific communication form, whether a letter, a lecture, a conversation, a published pamphlet, or a book. The circulation of such 'situated knowledge' is both mobile and mutable, polychronic and multi-temporal; it changes over time and is moulded by socially, culturally, economically, and politically-embedded and embodied practices. Like a rhizomorphic network, it is also a fluid field of production characterised by cycles of connectivity, multiplicity, and rupture. Such 'knowledge in transit' 12 requires an understanding of both location and locution; that is, space and language re-conceptualised as the 'geosemiotics' 13 of knowledge transfer.
Having written an object biography on William Colenso's composing stick and investigated it-narratives in nineteenth-century typographic journals, I was also inspired by Leah Price's call to think through what Roger Chartier called an 'internalist' account of reading. In The Order of Books, Chartier urges book historians to look, not at the reading habits of a group defined by 'a priori social oppositions,' but rather at 'the social areas in which each corpus of texts and each genre of printed matter circulates.' 14 Price elaborates on this brief In How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain: 'instead of starting from a person and asking what books he owned,' she proposes a method that 'starts from a book and asks into whose possession it came. In this model, the book would exemplify Arjun Appadurai's argument that while "from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context."' 15 However, as I applied the situated knowledges model in my everyday practice, I became increasingly uncomfortable with the notion of a 'biography' of a book that privileged anthropogenic authority and denied agency to the morethan-human. I turned to the work of Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and Jane Bennett, amongst others, where the debates about the western nature|culture binary, agency, and thing-formation were being interrogated. Donna Haraway, for instance, claims that 'situated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not as a screen or ground or resource, never finally as slave to the master that closes off the dialectic.' 16 In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari propose that 'a book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds. To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations.' 17 Like Latour's 'actant,' a book symbiotically both translates actions and shapes them. Reading becomes, then, a co-mingling of matter/s that embraces both peritext and epitext and, as in Appadurai's formulation, is subject to 'individual manipulation.' The intersection between people, places, and things that constitutes the event horizon in the situated knowledges model resonates with Philippe Lejeune's notion that autobiography is a mode of reading negotiated between writer and reader. His 'pacte autobiographique' liberates the subject/object dichotomy, and energises the idea of identity co-creation, thus underscoring Charlie Gleek's contention that 'a bibliographic document (book) articulates its own autobiography, and that a reader only apprehends this autobiography when they encounter or read the object in a specific textual condition.' 18 Inserting the work of Clifford Geertz and Mika Bal into the world of commodity exchange, Simon Frost notes that 'the exchanged object, its wording and other material signs, does not have meaning in and of itself but that meaning, along with value in toto, is created in the event of the sign-objects framed […] an idea that can be clarified by thinking of the "book" itself as a social event.' 19 Frost's solution to the book as social event is to stage a series of five encounters between readers and books in Henry March Gilbert's 'Ye Olde Booke Shoppe' at 26, Above Bar Street, Southampton, around 1900. These 'imaginative acts' are less pieces of creative non-fiction than examples of historical fiction, constrained by verifiable historical facts whose measure is plausibility, yet selfconsciously fashioned by a culturally, temporally, and spatially embodied twenty-first-century author. 'The figures populating the following narratives have existed. Traces of them are extant in the historical record, but their voices are lost: a dilemma faced by historical reading studies.' 20 The reading profile of each character is deftly shaped, punctuated by mentions of contemporary newspapers, periodicals, and books: often named, sometimes priced, and incidentally, described. As we voyeuristically eavesdrop on these engaging inner soliloquies, the focus remains firmly on how individual readers may have experienced the process of exchange in commodity culture. In the process, paradoxically, the individual book's thingness, its vibrant materiality is erased. This is particularly evident in the enumeration of titles that may have been in Gilbert's bookshop as well as the assumption that the preliminary bibliography of Gilbert's publications in Frost's appendix functions as a placeholder if not surrogate for the absence of any extant bookseller's catalogues or provenance research documenting known copies with Gilbert's distinctive yellow bookseller's ticket. Thus, each reader's life is a concatenation of possibilities based on generic distinctions be-tween class, gender, and political leanings. Is there another way of giving voice to these artefacts of attention, these workings of matter? My skin is smooth, crisp to the touch and ear, smelling of old age, tasting of many hands. My flyleaf is crushed by an oval stamp, raised on the recto, indented on the verso. My senses trace G. Cawte, binder, Southampton.
EXHIBIT C Captain Kent's Bible, August 16, 1881. Cox Papers, Southampton City Archives, (D/Cox.G 1/6/1) Large gestural swashes of graphite expose the blind embossed surface of my fine morocco binding. I belonged to Cap't Kent who paid an astonishing £2/2/0 for me in 1881. Today, I exist only as a tracing.
These three exhibits exemplify what I call 'ghosts in the archive.' They may be an apparition, a spectre; a shadowy outline or semblance, an unsubstantial image (of something), hence, a slight trace or vestige; bibliographically, they may be a non-existent book or edition or issue erroneously included in some work of reference which by repetition has achieved a misleading semblance of reality. 21 They are not documented in the catalogue record or metadata. They rarely survive the transition into digitised spaces and may only appear as a shadowy digital presence. For all intents and purposes they might not even exist. And yet, they have lives to be acknowledged and stories to be told. But who can tell their stories? Or more particularly, who has the right to tell their stories?
Locative, site-specific, or ambient storytelling 22 has emerged as a way of generating interactive narratives that position the reader as storymaker prompted by moving through physical or virtual spaces. These experiences can be mul- Once clicked, each node (signalled by the green flag on the map and listed alphabetically on the right) displays a thumbnail of the VRR image with a link to the artefact, as well as salient details about the artefact such as author, publisher, bookworker, and a caption.
Three stories enable different modes of user interaction: simultaneous access to all artefacts; access while in situ at the specific physical location triggered by a GPS alert on your mobile; and temporal slices by decade. As Spawforth explains, the first story produced provides access to all of the artefacts simultaneously, with no requirements that the reader visit the location. This allows a reader to freely explore the artefacts, while still being able to view the location of the associated bookworker within Southampton. This also provides a useful view for authors who wish to view the locations they have to work with while hand-crafting a story. The second story is nearly identical to the first, except it requires readers to be present at the location in order to read the content. By mandating in-situ reading, we can give a sense of place to each of the artefacts. This is particularly true for the artefacts that present images of Southampton. The third story provides the reader with a list of time periods to choose from: by default, these have been chosen as decades. When selected, all of the artefacts published in that decade are shown. While this story demonstrates a means of filtering content, locations are not shown on the map for each decade, limiting its ability to be read on location. 27 Although we did not have time to rigorously test the prototype in the field or gather statistical evidence of its use, we recognised that future refinements should include using georectified historical maps as the base map, a feature not possible in the current software configuration; the addition of creative nonfiction narratives, specifically in the genre of the 'it-narrative' which focus on the book or archive object telling its own story generated by the researcher and/ or through public interactions; and a customised StoryPlaces instance to enhance the artefact-driven experience, making it more accessible to the public and delivering greater impact.
One example of an artefact narrative brings us back to Gilbert's bookshop. William Williams' A Dictionary of the New Zealand language, and a concise grammar; to which are added a selection of colloquial sentences travelled from its birthplace in Paihia, New Zealand in 1844 to Gilbert's bookshop in Southampton, and back to the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington (New Zealand). Drawing on research in two hemispheres that documented over two centuries of material peregrinations, I recently offered a biography of this book followed by a thought experiment, an autobiography. 28 Could the latter have existed without the former? Can the evidence upon which a new approach to biblioforensics is based be conveyed solely through an it-narrative, though a talking book? A second example moves us from Gilbert's bookshop to the world of George Cawte and Henry Daubney Cox, bookbinders, whose tissue ledger documents this firm's pivotal role in the Southampton shipping trade. These extant records attest to the range of mobile clientele, their literary interests, and their imperial aspirations. Captains and Commanders alike ordered bespoke bindings for their precious intellectual cargo. Between 1909Between -1910, eighteen steamships sent their libraries to 5 West Street for repair, rebinding, resewing, rebacking, and relettering. Often the monthly orders were simply described as a 'box of books'; at other times we have the citation of precious titles: Germinal, Lorna Doone, Richard Feveral, Don Quixote, Plain Tales from the Hills, In Japan, Innocents Abroad and Round the World in 80 Days. Embarking from Southampton, locallymade leather bindings, blind and gilt tooling, paper, glue and linen thread wandered all over the world. Bibliographers are trained in the forensics of the material book and consider every material component as a piece of evidence assembled for a 'Crime Scene Investigation.' But what if the books themselves could talk? When Walter Benjamin asked 'What if things could speak?' he provocatively added 'and who is going to translate them?' As Gleek suggests, 'we need not write a biography of a book because an autobiography already exists when we encounter the object. Instead, our scholarly goals become apprehending and articulating the stakes that such autobiographies play in mediating meaning.' 31 If a new approach to biblioforensics inserts the book historian into the story and gives voice to artefacts, then locative storytelling becomes a compelling and innovative form of scholarly expression -assuming the institutionalised metrics for scholarly performance can embrace creative and generative approaches to new knowledge formation.
In her highly evocative work, The Allure of the Archives, French eighteenthcentury historian Arlette Farge suggests that 'the reality of the archive lies not only in the clues it contains, but also in the sequences of different representations of reality.' Farge likens the historian's approach to unpick the infinitude of these realities to that of a prowler searching for what is buried away in the archives, looking for the trail of a person or event, while remaining attentive to that which has fled, which has gone missing, which is noticeable by its absence. Both presence and absence from the archive are signs we must interpret in order to understand how they fit into the larger landscape. 32 Similarly, Walter Benjamin, who wrote about the 'aura' of objects in the age of photomechanical reproduction also crafted an essay 'Excavation and Memory,' in which he posits that it is not the object itself or the inventory of the archaeologist's findings that is important, but rather, the act of marking the precise location where it is found. 33 What are the stakes in apprehending and articulating the fusion of location and locution? By accepting the zoomorphic vitality of things, book historians can recalibrate the terms of material engagement, acknowledge their complicity in the construction of narratives, and forge new understandings of the interrelationship between people, places and things. As Farge muses, Words are windows; they will let you catch a glimpse of one or several contexts. But words can also be tangled and contradictory. They can articulate inconsistences whose meaning is far from clear. Just when you think you have finally discovered the framework underlying the way events unfolded and individuals acted, opaqueness and contradiction begin to creep in. Incongruous spaces emerge with no apparent connection to the landscape that seemed to be taking shape only a few documents earlier. These discordant spaces and gaps harbour events as well, and the hesitant and unfamiliar words used to describe them create a new object. These words reveal existences or stories that are irreducible to any typology or attempt at synthesis, and do not neatly fit into any easily described historical context […] History is not a balanced narrative of results of opposing moves. It is a way of taking in hand and grasping the harshness of reality, which we can glimpse through the collision of conflicting logics. 34