Novels are not just extended narratives bound and printed in codex form. They are also gateways to imaginative worlds that are constructed not just on the page but on a backstage composed of the sorts of materials that abound in archives: marked up source books, maps, reference tools, diagrams and drawings, paper slips, notes to self and others, inventories, rough and not-so-rough drafts. Umberto Eco’s 1994 novel The Island of the Day Before is one…
 
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