“My dear Mr. Boffin, everything wears to rags,” said Mortimer, with a light laugh.

obscene book history

obs scaena, "off stage"

obscene book history

"...the darker underground of hidden fluxes that surface only irregularly to give a taste of the underbelly of a deep media history."

Jussi Parikka, The Anthrobscene

Beginning of paper production life-cycle:

Rags, and especially white and good linen rags, were among the things most zealously inquired for by street-buyers, and then 3d. a pound was a price readily paid.

End of paper production life-cycle:

There is a body of men in London who occupy themselves entirely in collecting waste paper. It is no matter of what kind…books of every description are ingredients of this waste, and in every language; modern poems or pamphlets and old romances…Shakespeare, Moliere, Bibles…all these are found in the insatiate bag of the waste collector[.]

“Paper! White, pure, spick and span new paper…. Is it from such bales of dusty rags…that virgin paper, to be written on, and printed on, proceeds?”

Climate change is “the final falling in of history on the present”
(Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital)

[The realist novel] cannot but remain allegorical, since the object it attempts to represent – namely the social totality itself – is not an empirical entity and cannot be made to materialize as such in front of the individual viewer. In effect, the new figure we are asked to supply continues to suggest something other than itself.

Frederic Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic

...the shadowy ships in the river slowly chang[ing] to black substances; and the sun, blood-red on the eastern marshes behind dark masts and yards, seemed filled with the ruins of a forest it had set on fire.

(Our Mutual Friend, emphasis added)

Thanks!

sources