Leviathan’s larval subjects – thoughts on conveyor belts, metal worms and tunnelling

This is a short companion piece to yesterday’s blog-post, ‘Behemoth’. It’s inspired by Matt Barnes’ (@Liminalcity) suggestion that the tunnel boring plant currently eating an underground path for London’s Crossrail project might comprise the larval stage of the mobile plant monsters that yesterday’s post was concerned with. Matt’s comment got me thinking about tunnel boring machines, mines and snaggle toothed worms. Here’s the result.

Larval cousins

I’m tempted not to write any words to accompany this juxtaposition of images. The pairing probably makes its point powerfully without need for explanation. What hits me though is how close this uncanny resemblance is.

Larval excretions

As the tunnel bore and the worm each push their way through the ground they disturb and ingest the soil and rock in their path. There is no spare space between them and the ground in which they are encased. The only ways that matter can be displaced is squeezing it onto/into the surrounding ground, or by taking it inside, and passing it along their linear bodies. And in each case eventually it spews out at surface level, leaving telltale mounds: spoil heap, worm cast or mole hill. These mounds then stand as lasting physical proxy for the chew and squeeze undulations invisibly played out by these subterranean creatures as they pulse themselves onward through the silent darkness.

In the case of Crossrail’s excretions there’s a fascinating account of the journey and fate of 4.5 million tonnes of that project’s 6.5 million tonnes of spoil by Bull (2012). He charts the lorry-railway-conveyor-jetty-estuary journey that carries this stuff eastward, to Northfleet and the swelling mudflats of Wallasea.

Larval journey

I went down Wales’ last working deep coal mine in the 1990s. For a few hours I had a taste of that worm-world. Everything underground was tubular, the immortalised pathway of some previous steel tunnel worm. The thing that struck me most was the emptiness of this then still-active place. Hundreds of striplights illuminating almost nothing. Imagine the London Underground stripped of posters, people, tiles, trains or free newspapers. These were wide tunnels of nothingness, pathways along which the conveyor belts ran. To get to the coal face we had to ride these conveyors, lying prone, face down as the belt hurtled along these deserted tunnels. As we each lay in our position on the belts we seemed very isolated, very distant from our companions. We were left to our thoughts, and we got a fleeting chance to sample what it must be like to be commodity riding these purposive, automated, rubber highways.

Eventually we were decanted, and completed our journey to the coal face on foot. Here the roof became lower, and I remember the walls as darker, of evident rock (the earlier tunnels in my mind’s eye were smooth, and white lined – although this is probably a mistake, a conflation with subsequent journeys on the Tube). Thereafter we faced a final hunched stagger into a metal machine forest of hydraulic jacks, each standing in line holding up thousands of tonnes of the world above our frail bones. These jacks could walk, shunting forwards as the cutting face advanced. This was a hollow worm.

And then the cutter came buy, a massive rotary head slicing the coal seam from side to side, throwing up clouds of dust into the headtorch beams and sending fractured coal-rock onto the conveyor to begin its long surface-bound journey. The effect was like sitting inside an unusually dusty and noisy printer assembly, watching the print head purposively and powerfully march to and fro along its guide rail, and with an overwhelming feeling that ‘I really shouldn’t be here, this isn’t a human place’. Then a small stray piece of coal flew towards me, it was something at a scale that I could make sense of – like the fuel chunks the coal man used to bring to our home – I pocketed it, feeling suddenly grounded, and began the slow journey back to the surface.

At the surface we were directed to the shower block where we climbed out of our orange overalls and scrubbed at the underground dust that we now carried in every skin-fold. Emerging back into daylight, back dressed in our lawyers-on-a-day-out-to-indulge-a-client garb, we walked towards a line of laughing miners. The laughter only increased as we stepped closer. Then pointing, and a mirror. We’d proved the bet right. We were incapable of washing as proficiently as a miner. The mirror showed think black kohl-like residue around our eyelashes and other deeply engrained coal dust tattoos.  We were neophytes, new to this game. We had a lot to learn. We were the larvae.

The urge to dig

The ‘larval subjects’ part of the title of this piece comes (via Deleuze) from Levi Bryant’s blog-site of the same name. As Bryant puts it: “Larvae are creatures in a process of becoming” he then likens that to the putative aims of his writing on his blog. Perhaps something similar can be said about burrowing. What strikes me looking back over the tunnelling machines, office workers venturing tentatively into a coal mine and meditations on a worm’s rhythmic motion is how each entity drives forward because it is in its nature to do so. Implicit is a journey towards something, but that target is vague and probably unattainable in any final sense for the entity itself. This is a driven drivenness, a propulsion that the entity may have no account for. Give me a spade on a beach and I start to dig. Ask me why and all I can say is, “it’s for the pleasure of the digging” (or if I’m feeling arsely: I’d say “Because you’ve just given me a spade”). That’s as deep as it gets.

Let’s leave the last word here to the Hackney Mole Man, William Lyttle who spent 40 years burrowing beneath and beyond his East London home, excavating 100 cubic metres of earth before finally being stopped by a Council enforcement notice. In his defence Lyttle ‘explained’:

“I first tried to dig a wine cellar, and then the cellar doubled, and so on…tunnelling is something that should be talked about without panicking…I don’t mind the title of inventor. Inventing things that don’t work is a brilliant thing, you know. People are asking what the big secret is. And you know what? There isn’t one.” (in Lewis 2006)

References

Bull, J. (2012) ‘The end of the earth: Crossrail to Wallasea’ London Connections blogsite: www.londonreconnections.com/2012/the-end-of-the-earth-crossrail-at-wallasea

Lewis, P. (2006) ‘After 40 years’ burrowing, Mole Man of Hackney is ordered to stop’ The Guardian, 8 August

Advertisement

Behemoth: on the beguiling monstrosity of the wandering factory

“Then the earth shook and trembled; the foundations also of the hills moved and were shaken, because he was wroth. There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth devoured: coals were kindled by it. He bowed the heavens also, and came down: and darkness was under his feet….He made darkness his secret place; his pavilion round about him were dark waters and thick clouds of the skies. At the brightness that was before him his thick clouds passed, hail stones and coals of fire.”

Psalms 18: 7-12

 

Many of the practices that I’m interested in involve walking factories – in the sense of walking around and within them for a variety of reasons. But what about factories that walk? That’s worth a ponder.

There’s something monstrously captivating about the idea of a moving factory – a truly mobile plant unmoored and roaming abroad, rapaciously consuming all in its path. It’s the point at which a vehicle become more complex, more totalising in its operations, than it feels a vehicle should. A point where the factory function starts to foreground and the vehicular elements retreat into the background. Think roadsweeper, combine harvester, dragline, tarmac layer. Factories on wheels, churning, belching – slow, but relentless. And  beyond human, for any driver seems dwarfed, superfluous, stuck somewhere spare that hasn’t already been consumed by an asymmetric (and unstreamlined) productive purpose. And then there’s the nomadic dimension: this machine is untethered. It is free to move next wherever it may, there are no rails or foundations to constrain it. This thing has chaotic potency.

A Walkley Factory walks

This week started with an expedition, a search for an invisible hole. The task was to trace to source the origin point of a house brick that I found when my garage was demolished a few summers ago. The brick helpfully had an inscription in its frog, ‘Chas. Wirkworth – Wadsley Bridge’. A bit of map work found the site of the former brickworks and we trekked to it. But this piece is not about that trip. Instead it is about a trip that we did not take. My research found many ‘vanished’ brick work sites across the historic maps that I’d spread out on the kitchen table. Flicking through as a time sequence, holding location stable but skimming through successive editions of the ‘same’ map, my attention was drawn to a former brickworks and clay pit on Carnaby Road in the Walkley district of Sheffield. Here’s the time slice:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Two things grab me here. First that the brickworks doesn’t – does – doesn’t exist. It is a blip in time. In its day it dominates its site, then its gone, the clay cavity in-filled with refuse. The second is the thoughts triggered by thinking about the scale and extractive / generative ferocity of the plant whilst it existed. Through time the brickworks appears mobile. Maybe I’ve been watching too many end-of-the-world-alien-invasion films with the kids recently, but the strange two kiln beast appears to travel (an effect of the doesn’t – does – doesn’t flicking through maps and the eras that they represent). Thus an alien brick-ship descends upon an empty field, chomps into the land consuming earth in its fiery furnaces and spewing out millions of identikit bricks. But then something weird happens. The bricks start to form houses. The brick-ship becomes surrounded and flies off, leaving its empty field. The house army laying siege to the field pause (perhaps awaiting reinforcements from elsewhere) before finally crashing in, tide like, filling the field with their next generation host.

And then it’s all over, at least until a wave of urban clearance or a road scheme pulverises the houses in turn, rendering them back to fractured brick and block-dust and the ground level swells with a new layer of ground. Made ground.

Credits

Photo: http://www.agg-net.com/resources/media-gallery/image/mobile-feeder-0

Maps: Digimap

Tracing as trivial pursuit: Inverness, Collection Point B, 1.44pm, 7 August 1997

 “Always look at the whole: what that thing is that gives you such an impression, and undo it, distinguishing it into its cause, its matter, its point, the time within which it must come to a stop.”

Marcus Aurelius

Roman Emperor and Stoic Philosopher 

Meditations (c180AD) xii.18

A postcard from somewhere I’ve never been

I’ve never been to Inverness and have no particular reason to think that I will ever go there. No doubt it has its charms – as all coastal towns do – but it means nothing to me, and I have next to no knowledge of it. It’s somewhere in Scotland, on the east coast, and quite northerly. People live there. They are much like me. And they have an Argos, or at least they did one lunchtime in 1997.

Thursday, 7^th August 1997 was a long day. In Inverness the sun rose at 5.25am that morning and would not set until 9.19pm. During the 15 hours, 53 minutes and 19 seconds of daylight, the then oldest man in Britain died, Princess Diana started her holiday with Dodi Fayed and a sudden movement of an insufficiently tethered consignment of 16 pallets of denim en route to the Dominican Republic caused a DC-8-61F cargo plane to crash land during its lunchtime takeoff at Miami airport. In its frantic descent the out of control plane narrowly missed a Budweiser Distribution Facility and finally came to rest in the car park of a local shopping mall, destroying 26 cars in the ensuing fireball.

Meanwhile, back in Inverness, amongst a plethora of other non-newsworthy events that day, someone, for some reason, purchased a copy of the Trivial Pursuit game at 1.44pm in the city’s own local mall.

I know this because I have the receipt. I found it Sellotaped to the inside face of the game’s upper lid when I pulled open the box to play that same copy last weekend. This essay is about the ways in which I have tried to understand the odd feelings that struck me as I unexpectedly came across this small document, lying dormant inside ‘my’ game’s box.

In writing this essay I’m fully aware that this artefact is but one of millions of its kind generated each year. It has no special qualities other than that circumstances have combined to provoke me to subject this iteration of this everyday thing to greater scrutiny that it usually warrants.

Ian Bogost, writing of his take on object oriented ontology, calls for the practice of ‘ontography’, an endeavour in which the action and constitution of objects (and their relationship with other objects) is charted, or more specifically conjectured. As Bogost (2012) puts it, the aim should be to write:

“the speculative fictions of [objects’] processes, of their unit operations. Our job is to get our hands dirty with grease, juice, gunpowder and gypsum. Our job is to go where everyone has gone before, but where few have bothered to linger”

So, in what follows I offer up some speculative fictions for this humble Argos receipt. Trying to linger longer than convention dictates that I should, giving it more attention than it ‘deserves’ and seeing what I come up with. This involves applying different perspectives, scales and genres – none any more important or determinative than any other.

‘There are Eight million stories in the Naked City’

She perhaps stood at the brink of the Eastgate Shopping Centre and waited for many minutes before stepping forth across the threshold. The sun was bright in the street and her eyes adjusted slowly as she went inside. She had been to the bank and withdrawn her savings, carrying the money in a folded up newspaper that she had hurriedly purchased for that purpose. Entering Argos a few moments later she found a quiet corner of the shop floor, extracted two crisp £20 notes from the bundle and joined the queue to place her order. She’d found out a few days before just how much this game would cost (£37.99) and she still found it hard to accept that that really could be true, but it was, and she wanted the best for her son. And the best was this set of 4800 answers.

At 1.44pm precisely she paid up and then shuffled into position, at Collection Point B standing at a position midway between the bulbous display monitor hanging from the ceiling, and the collection counter. After a few moments her number flashed, on the fat dull green and black CRT screen. She then collected her purchase and quietly left the shop. The fresh faced assistant at the counter had put the receipt in the bag. The number 72 bus then took her home, and once there she took the receipt and the box out from the bag and laid them on the dining table. With the edge of a pen lid she then scored a line across the cellophane, cautiously unwrapped and opened the box before carefully fixing the receipt into the underside of the lid. Then she reassembled the package, covering it in Simpsons themed wrap and attached a modest gift tag, written with the words “To Kevin, with love forever, your Mum (I’m sorry)” on top, slightly off-centre so as not to occlude any of Bart’s faces. She then placed the gift on the table and walked out of the family home for the last time.

‘To a hammer everything looks like a nail’ (Bogost 2012)

The rubber soles paused at the transition from warm paving slab to the cooler ceramic floor tiles within the shopping centre. Then, with a cautious step to adjust for differential traction, those soles shuffled onward and into the hardy microfibre caress of the store. Here enfolded paper was unfurled, leaves loosening their grip on each other, yielding individual slips of exquisitely ink printed watermarked and silver-slither stitched parchment. These were then presented through an invisible downdraft column of mechanically chilled air by a cantilever of sweaty palm-flesh, and quickly ushered onward into the still air darkness of a smooth plastic cash drawer, held taught there by its stainless steel retention spring. Then chug-whir, a spool spun deep within the till in obedience to the command of an electro-mechanical jolt. Ink was sprayed in regimented dance, an array of dots building up line by line as the paper spewed up into the cavernous room. Then, rip. Cellulose fibres cleanly severed by internal blade. A receipt was born. An arm movement then scooped the paper slip upward, transferring it to another, more clammy hand which then – moving in an approximate arc – transited to the statically charged air hanging stale beneath the cathode ray tube, and its phosphorous glow. Here a moment of local stillness, amidst a sea of sound and movement. Presently a box rode down a rubber incline, slid across a smooth white surface, was briefly raised up by another fleshy crane and then tumbled into the spangle shaded caressing walls of a plastic bag where it nestled snugly, pinned between the inner wall of the bag and the cellophane wrapper of the box. The surfaces embraced in mutual congress as the rubber soles move back out into the street, to the grey metal pole with the characters ‘bus stop’ affixed at its skyward end, and thereafter via the added  frisson of a bumpy bus ride, to a flat wooden plain upon which cellophane was then flayed from glossed cardboard. The box was opened. Air was exchanged and the receipt was adhered to the cardboard, where it then sat in ageless darkness, shielded against ultraviolent light and oxidation for 16 years before suddenly encountering daylight again.

The invisible

Whether they realise it or not, our unnamed shopper and her receipt met in a rich – but invisible – symbolic realm that shaped the form, existence and experience of the street, the shop, the commodity and the act of exchange that day. 1.44pm: a creation of the Summer Time Act 1916. 7 August: the legacy of Augustus and the Roman insertion of summer months. 1997: a Christian inheritance. VAT number. 30 day returns policy. Scottish bank notes. Bus deregulation. Sanitation services. Anti-slip mats. Building Regulations. Risk assessment. Pension funds. Planning permission. Street Litter Control Zones. CCTV. The Producer Responsibility (Packaging Waste) Regulations 1997, Total Quality Management, The Shops, Offices & Railway Premises Act 1963, British Standards, The Consumer Credit Act 1974. The list could go on, for many pages…

‘Beam me up Scotty’

What struck me most as I opened the box last weekend was how that receipt gave me precise co-ordinates in both time and space. All that was missing was a time machine. If I had one the receipt would give me a fix on an event that I had no part in. Travelling there (and then) in my blue box I could materialise Doctor Who-like at the moment of ‘my’ Trivial Pursuit’s purchase, and follow its purchaser home and witness it’s ‘box-fresh’ unveiling. That idea then got me thinking about all the unknowns about ‘my’ game’s provenance, all the events, material processes and elements in circulation, before, during and after 1:44pm on 7 August 1997. It made the world seem both big and small. Particularly as I conjectured the circumstances in which ‘my’ iteration of this product had somehow thereafter found its way South, and presented itself for purchase in a Sheffield charity shop. It had then lain unopened in my attic for a few more years, until remembered by happenstance last weekend.

What will be the final destination of this thing? Could we ever account for all of its stations, or for all of the layers at which its story and context could be read? The answer is a simple ‘no’. And speculation is probably as close as we can get to making any selection from the multitudinous layers meaningful in human terms. The best I can do is invent narratives and/or material or symbolic contexts each within which to somehow ground and know this slip of paper.

The difficulty of the exercise is that this mundane occurrence, lacks identity as an event. Effort has to be applied to make it noteworthy, and in the doing so something necessarily gets superimposed; colour and/or order are added. As Highmore (2011) puts the difficulty (in the course of his persuasive search for an aesthetics of the ordinary):

“But when there is no remark to be made, no event to be marked out, then where would you possibly start, and where could you possibly end, in giving an account of the ordinary?”

At an earlier point in his book he helpfully invokes Michel de Certeau’s notion of a “science of singularity” – case study method by another name – and points to fiction as creating a space in which attention can linger on features of the everyday which would otherwise fall “through the cracks between disciplines”. Again he invokes de Certeau who saw fiction, and its scope for creating “indexes of particulars”, as a haven of representational space for the:

“everyday virtuosities that science doesn’t know what to do with and which become the signatures, easily recognised by readers, of everyone’s micro-stories.” (de Certeau 1984: 70).

The vignettes above tried to sketch some of the micro-stories (or unit-operations – take your pick of the term you prefer) of the unknown shopper, the surfaces and the abstract systems brought together in the everyday event of buying a board game. In spirit I had Georges Perec in mind, and also the children’s fiction of Alan Arhlberg’s Gaskitt Family stories, like The Man Who Wore All His Clothes. Perec and Arhlberg both present an overabundance of incidental detail, and in doing so cause the density of the everyday world to tumble into view. Objects step forward centre stage, silent processes are heard, lives, bodies and surfaces interact and the chaos and approximation of perception and communication are laid bare.

But does the attempt to narrate or otherwise spotlight these sub-events actually bring them into view? The irony is that, as I look back, pulling this piece together has rather worked to erase the odd feeling of poignancy that struck me when I first encountered the receipt last week. Opening the box let daylight in. Given enough time that daylight would erase the ink and also work to destroy the cellulose bonds within the paper itself. Left long enough the receipt would pass onward from illegibility to deterioration to dust. And, so too as I subject this slip of paper to excessive attention its hinted specialness fades in the neon light of familiarity. It recedes back into the background, where it and most things probably belong and/or are condemned to sit.

References:

Ahlberg, A. (2001) The Man Who Wore All His Clothes, Walker Books: London.

Bogost, I. (2011) Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, University of Minnesota Press:  Minneapolis.

Cockpit Voice Recorder Database (n.d.) ‘7 August 1997 – Fine Air 101’ http://www.tailstrike.com/070897.htm

de Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press: London.

Highmore, B. (2011) Ordinary Lives – studies in the everyday, Routledge: London.

Perec, G. (1978) Life – A User’s Manual, Random House: London

Photograph: Eastegate Shopping Centre’s Noah’s Ark clock – hourly the automaton monkey climbs the Giraffe’s neck and strikes the bell: http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8452/8057396826_355d361c41_z.jpg

The books that bind – thoughts on merging with place

“Objects surely don’t talk. Or do they? The person in that living room gives an account of themselves by responding to questions. But every object in that room is equally a form by which they have chosen to express themselves” (Miller, 2008: 2)

Whilst in Devon just before Christmas I visited an elderly relative. I’d not been to his house for over 30 years. I was last there in my early teens and stepping inside I was struck by how much I’d remembered, and how little seemed to have changed. Time moves slowly in cosy suburban family homes, capsules that pass through decades with only modest (but diligent) periodic adjustment of decor and utility. But in that fundamental sense of ‘home’, the houses themselves remain the same; the same footprint, the same proportions, the same textures of wood, woollen carpet, sideboards and occasional tables.

Stepping into the warm sitting room, as the youngest member of a rather elderly posse, I was welcomed and guided to a sofa by the room’s chief resident – Uncle T, for this was a visit to the room of a terminally ill man. But this man was still in control of his immediate world. That day, Uncle T was the consummate host, the master of ceremonies, his armchair positioned at the apex of the room, face on to the TV. A side table had a neat row of remote controls readily available for his hand’s grasp.

In this room, all seats faced towards the TV and the sideboard beyond. On those shelves were Christmas cards, assorted decorations gathered and cherished over the years, and an abundance of cotton wool simulating the snow that hardly ever falls on the real ground outside. I quickly came to realise that, in this room, everything had its place, both physically and also within a rich symbolic order. My fellow visitors and hosts discussed cards and clan-family allegiances intently, and in doing so mapped out a rich socio-spatial hierarchy, for it was revealed that the positioning of particular cards on the display shelves was a product of an assessment of a measured quantum of love, and of the degree of concordance of motif and inscription to what was expected. This was a rich anthropology of sign and status, a system of propriety offering itself up in a warm sitting room in suburban Torquay.

But what struck me most then (and even more so looking back now) was the neat rows of books about Devon arranged on shelves at Uncle T’s right shoulder. This was a pre-internet treasured trove of Birthday and Christmas gifts. An archive built lovingly through a lifetime by an enthusiast. And, I must assume, reflective of a deep interest in the context of the locality within which Uncle T had lived his entire life, a life which finally ended yesterday after a long illness.

In recalling the scene in that room: the people, the chatter, the cards, the ornaments and the books I’m left with an impression of connection to place, connection to context and the comfort born of both relationships with things themselves and of cherished knowledge about those things and their orderings.

And here I’m reminded of Nick Papadimitriou’s yearning to become Middlesex, to merge into the place that means so much to him, and which he has written about so eloquently in Scarp, and which he more than hinted at in John Roger’s documentary, The London Perambulator (2009). Papadimitriou shows in both how throughout his life the northern London edgelands were akin to a cherished parent, and how from seeking solace a deep urge to know this territory at all levels and in all conceivable ways came to the fore. He would forage both land and bookshops and libraries, amassing an archive of local knowledge – ecology, topography, infrastructure, history and ghosts: in his words a ‘deep topography’, one built from a process by which:

“I pull my region closer, dragging its leaf-fall, scrap iron, blotting-paper substance home with me after every walk. I spread my finds out on the trestle table and spend long evenings in examination. I hear voices hovering around these tiny fragments of other times, other people’s lives…” (Papadimitriou 2012: 77)

Papadimitriou and Uncle T were very different people. To Uncle T the terms psychogeographer, urban explorer or antiquarian would have been meaningless (and probably corrosive). Instead, I think Uncle T was performing something straighter, but no less engaged in seeking out a context, an understanding of his locality. Whether motivated by local history, rambling  or appropriatism (the ‘Local Interest’ section in any bookshop attracts many who would regard such an interest as healthy, positive and socially aspirant) these books were accumulated and – I must assume by their multitude and prominence – read, re-read and cherished.

Mike Parker, in his wry thoughts on how best to differentiate funky middle-aged psychogeographers from third-aged ramblers and local history enthusiasts, offers up the view that these respective practices are distinguished (only) by a difference in reflexivity. As he puts it:

“The greatest difference is humour: a deep map of anywhere needs irony, poetry and a sharp sense of both the ridiculous and the sublime, not qualities generally found among the serried ranks of bank managers in the local history society.” (2010: 272)

As Parker notes, this is rather a harsh judgment on the non-psychogeographers. But I think it carries some truth. Uncle T was a serious headed man. Those of Uncle T’s cast carry a sober faith in the journey towards truth and completeness that their engagements with their localities are achieving. Deep topographers of Papadimitriou’s hue seek and find a dislocation at the heart of what they find; a mystery rather than a mastery. Psychogeographic enquiry, it seems to me, seeks an experiential multiplication of the pieces, and not necessarily with the aim of totalisation or conclusive understanding.

But whilst the reason for each of these types of journeys may be different, each – at their extreme – points to an ultimate absorption into the place that is the subject of the intense scrutiny. And so, I’d like to think that Uncle T has now at last – in an entirely unpsychogeographic manner – found a way to finally become Devon itself.

References:

Miller, D. (2008) The Comfort of Things, Polity: Cambridge.

Papadimitriou, N. (2012) Scarp, Sceptre: London

Parker, M. (2010) Map Addict, Collins: London

Rogers, J. (dir) (2009) The London Perambulator (documentary) available to view at http://londonperambulator.wordpress.com/

Photograph: http://www.fusionuk.co.uk/autumn/fusbm/Devon%20Range/bookcase.jpg