Plate I — De Pisce Hodierno
Of Today's Fish
It hangs in the green water like a torn page, all vertical bars and pale silver, the fins drawn out into ribbons. I have watched it for the better part of an hour and it has scarcely moved, only the gill-cover working, the eye a small bead of aquamarine. Linnaeus would have liked its symmetry. I like that it does not seem to mind being looked at.
— field note, recopied in fair hand, with the gel-pen heart in the margin where I could not help it.
Plate II — Index Studiorum
Index of Studies
A working bibliography, hand-typed onto ruled cream, in the order I came to need each book.
- Linné, C. von — Systema Naturae, ed. duodecima. Holmiae, 1766. (For the binomials, and the nerve to use them.)
- Bock, B. — Hortus Eystettensis. Eichstätt, 1613. (The tulip in profile, plate çxliv; I copy its line-weight shamelessly.)
- Codex Casanatense 1889. Lisbon, c. 1540. (The fish that taught me a specimen could also be a jewel.)
- Bleeker, P. — Atlas Ichthyologique des Indes Orientales. Amsterdam, 1862–78. (For the Betta fin geometry.)
- Werner, A. G. / Syme, P. — Nomenclature of Colours. Edinburgh, 1814. (My theory of the swatch comes from here, lightly bedazzled.)
- Field notebooks, vols. i–ix — author's own, velvet-jacketed, studded. (Cited with embarrassment and gratitude.)
Plate III — Camera Obscura
The Dark Chamber
A single aperture, the size of a thumbnail; through it the cabinet rotates upward — fern, fish, orchid-throat, moss, tulip — at a reading pace.
x mensis Maii
anno · mmxxvi
Plate IV — Diarium
The Diary
Diarium · folio recto
Today I pressed a young monstera leaf between two field notebooks and it left a green ghost on the page opposite, which I have decided to keep. There is a koi tank behind the frosted glass at the back of the reading room and I have begun to suspect the librarians arranged it on purpose. I drew the angelfish again. The gel-pen heart appears, as it always does, in the lower margin, and I have stopped apologising for it. A specimen is also, sometimes, a thing one loves.
— recopied in fair hand, dots on the i's done as small circles, the way a junior-high scholar would.
Plate V — Glossarium
A Glossary, Marine & Botanical
- caudal fin
- the tail; in the Betta, fanned to a half-moon when the fish is in display.
- frond
- the leaf of a fern, here Asplenium nidus, unfurling from a crozier.
- gill cover
- operculum; the small working flap behind the eye, by which I knew the angelfish was alive.
- herbarium tape
- gummed linen strip for mounting pressed specimens; mine is pale gold and I bedazzle the corners.
- iridescence
- structural colour, not pigment; the aquamarine edge of a scale, or of a rhinestone, depending.
- labellum
- the modified lower petal of an orchid; the throat, where the colour pools.
- sporophyte
- the spore-bearing stalk of a moss; a tiny capsule on a hair-thin stem.
- tessellation
- the overlapping arrangement of scales — the pattern this whole rail of navigation borrows.
- vellum
- fine calf-skin parchment; here, a cream the colour of a candlelit page.
- Wunderkammer
- a cabinet of wonders; the room this site is, and the disposition it asks of you.
Plate VI — De Coloribus
Of Colors
A nomenclature of hues, taken from forest moss, Betta fins, and herbarium tape — labelled, as Werner would have it, with the thing each colour was found in.
Plate VII — Correspondentia
A Letter
There is no form here, and no button. There is a letter, sealed in fuchsia wax with an embossed M, and if you wish to write back you will find the seal warms under the cursor and tilts to let you read it.
To the reader, with regard,
If anything in this small chapbook of plates made you look longer at a fish, or a fern, or a rhinestone, then it has done the only thing I asked of it. Write, if you like, to hello · at · miris · works. I read everything slowly, in the reading room, by the koi tank.
— the cataloguer