Words on the Paper, Mud on the Page

Abstract

Used First World War trench maps are vanishingly rare. They were essentially ephemeral; folded and refolded, torn, thrust into grubby
pockets, drawn on and discarded. New editions rendered old ones not just redundant, but dangerously misleading.

A map of this sort was part of an accession that I was working on. It was with other items of the type that often drift in with collections deposited in Archives (in this instance, two military wristwatches). Objects of this sort often seem peripheral in an archival context; they can’t be read in the way a document can. But the map was arguably in a permeable category between object and record as well.