Whichever way you put it – whether as connecting materialities or material connectivities – the question comes down to this: what does it mean to join things? ‘To join’ is such a simple, everyday verb, but per- haps for that very reason it has largely passed under the radar so far as scholarship is concerned. Yet it is only because things are joined that the material world can manifest any kind of coherence, and only because of its coherence can this world be inhabited. Once you start looking for them, joins are everywhere, in such a bewildering variety of guises that it is difficult to know where to begin any systematic investigation. There are knots and bindings, ties and ligaments, seams and stitches, catches and couplings, clasps and fastenings, hooks and hangers, clips and pegs, bolts and screws, and so on and on. Turning from things to words, the vocabulary for joins and joining, in English as in any other language, is just as rich and diverse, if not more so. In the course of writing this essay I have looked up the meanings of a host of words in the Oxford English Dictionary – including ‘add’, ‘accompany’, ‘apply’, ‘assemble’, ‘append’, ‘annex’, ‘attract’, ‘articulate’ and ‘adhere’, ‘aggregate’ and ‘associate’, to list only those beginning with ‘a’ – and all include ‘join’ among their many meanings.