Books, bothies and thinking in place: a new contribution to geographies of the book

Abstract

This article considers a unique type of book: the ‘bothy book’. These are cultural artefacts formed within bothies, simple shelters which now form a historic feature of the contemporary Scottish rural landscape. These books stress the co-mingling of person and place where environments are continually made, and remade, created and shaped, through the practices users are part of, and party to. These books push the boundaries of Ogborn and Withers’, ‘geographies of the book’, opening this subfield to these conflicting circumstances and new ‘books’ to be studied. These books are also thoroughly entangled in the ‘dwelling’ lifeworld of these buildings and hence are both representational and performative as well as material objects. This larger problematic is traced in this article through the narratives of bothy users, using their words to provide insight into dwelling in such buildings and, through this, the overarching relationship between ‘Hut Thought Word’.