Building 'Marginalia': Making a Victorian Book for an Imagined World
- Maxine Callow
- Jul 15
- 5 min read
If you follow my social media, have chatted to me about my work, or are one of the lovely people who reads these blog posts (thank you!), you'll probably know that my ceramics don't begin with clay. They begin with stories.
I write narrative poems in rhyme and then create ceramic interpretations of them. The pieces aren't literal illustrations, they're moments, fragments and characters lifted from a much larger imagined world. Once they're out in the open, they're free to become whatever viewers see in them, but every one of them has a history that exists long before the clay is wedged.
Throughout my MA I've spent a surprising amount of time wondering what should happen to those stories. Should the poems exist on the work? Hidden in QR codes? On a separate website? As surface decoration? The more I explored those possibilities, the less convinced I became. None of them felt like they belonged in the slightly grubby Victorian universe I'd created.
Ceramic Wales finally forced me to make a decision.
Working against the clock, I printed the poems that related to the pieces I was exhibiting, added background information about The Freakshow and its inhabitants, and tucked everything into a folder beneath the display table. I only brought it out when people wanted to know more.
To my surprise, those that saw it, seemed quite taken with it.
People wanted to know who Deaders was. Why Lady Delores carried a weaponised parasol. What had happened to Scrawny. They weren't simply looking at objects; they were looking for the stories hiding behind them.
That small folder answered a question I'd been asking myself throughout my MA. The narratives weren't an optional extra. They were part of the work.
The folder, however, wasn't. It was practical, but it wasn't immersive. It didn't belong to the world I'd built. If I wanted visitors to step into my Victorian universe, they needed to encounter something that looked as though it had always existed there.
So, the idea of Marginalia: A Register of Peculiar Denizens was born.
Finding a suitable book turned out to be impossible. I wanted something black, leather bound, filled with handmade paper, drawings, photographs, loose ephemera and curious objects. Something that looked as though it had spent the last century gathering dust on a forgotten shelf.
Nothing I found came close. So, rather inconveniently, I decided to make it.
I settled on an A5 format and began collecting everything I'd need. Handmade paper with deckled edges. Black suede for the cover. Gold thread. Ribbon. Brass corners. An embosser carrying my maker's mark. Alongside these came an ever-growing collection of tiny objects: keys, jewellery, eye patches and bow ties, all destined to become fragments of my characters' lives.
The contents grew just as quickly. Alongside the poems came character biographies, frequently asked questions gathered from social media, notes about my MA journey and pages of acknowledgements. I also disappeared happily into Victorian research, reading about London, medicine, women's lives and the peculiar details that help a fictional world feel believable. Research has always been one of my favourite parts of making. Every strange little historical fact feels like another thread I can weave into the fabric of The Freakshow.
Designing the book became another creative project entirely. Victorian typefaces were downloaded, tested and discarded until I found combinations that felt authentic without sacrificing readability. The title itself, Marginalia: A Register of Peculiar Denizens, appeared only after many hours of scribbled alternatives. It sounds perfectly inevitable now, but it certainly didn't feel that way at the time.
Printing and assembling everything brought its own challenges. Handmade paper, it turns out, has its own opinions on how to pass through printers. Several sheets emerged beautifully; several emerged looking as though the printer had enjoyed a three course lunch.
Then there was glue.
I had imagined this would be the simplest part of the entire project. It wasn't. Craft glue vanished into the paper. Hot glue peeled away. Spray mount created chaos. Eventually, after far more experimentation than I'd ever anticipated, humble PVA emerged as the unlikely hero.
Not every experiment succeeded. Tea staining caused the printed ink to run. Burning the edges looked contrived rather than naturally aged. Charcoal and pastel refused to behave. Gold leaf looked fabulous on the paper and dreadful on the suede. Every failed attempt helped refine the final object rather than decorate it for decoration's sake.
The book itself was sewn by hand in three sections using gold embroidery silk before being bound together into one tome with a ribbon bookmark sewn in. The black suede cover was wrapped around mount board with a curved spine and a window revealing the title page beneath. A simple line of gold stitching around the aperture added just enough detail without becoming overly ornate. Brass corner protectors and embossed maker's marks finished the piece.
One challenge remained. My imagined characters needed ancestors.
After unsuccessfully searching for suitable Victorian portraits of lush mice and haughty dodos, I eventually turned to AI to generate four family photographs. Even that wasn't a shortcut. It took hours of refining and adjusting before the faces felt as though they genuinely belonged inside my world.
Interestingly, making the book also expanded the universe itself. I designed advertisements, tickets, pamphlets and posters. Rat & Rook Company evolved into a much larger organisation with multiple enterprises. Parlour Ditch Hall emerged as a meeting place for my peculiar community. Half-finished poems were finally completed. My nana and grandad quietly found their way into its pages in little hidden references that most people will probably never notice. That’s very emotive.
The book stopped being documentation and became another artwork. Rather than explaining the ceramics, it sits beside them, extending the narrative beyond the clay. It rewards curiosity. Visitors can simply admire it from afar or lose themselves in its pages, discovering fragments of lives, histories and oddities that never quite fit onto a ceramic surface.
Finally, I added pockets into the pages, included removable photographs and pamphlets, and attached jewellery, keys, bow ties and eye patches throughout the book. Each discovery is another small invitation to explore.
And now it's finished. Well, Volume I is.
It's ready for my MA degree exhibition, future events and anyone curious enough to ask what's behind the characters. Unfortunately, somewhere between making the last page and closing the cover, I managed to think of enough new ideas to fill Volume II…
I suspect that's the trouble with imagined worlds. Once you build somewhere worth visiting, it's rather difficult to stop expanding the map.
Comments