In getting my books, I have been always solicitous of an ample margin ; this not so much through any love of the thing itself, however agreeble, as for the facility it affords me of pencilling suggested thoughts, agreements, and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general. Where what I have to note is too much to be included within the narrow limits of a margin, I commit it to a slip of paper, and deposit it between the leaves ; taking care to secure it by an imperceptible portion of gum tragacanth paste.
E.A. Poe, Collected Works, Volume 5, p. 175 ("Marginalia")
I am an inveterate marker of books. In my unschooled youth I used highlighters of a variety of colors: hot pink, blaze orange, psychedelic green, brilliant blue, and---most often---florescent yellow. There are still a few books in my collection which bear these marks of early abuse. Today, I use only pencil---and light pencil marks at that. But I still mark up MY books. I am, after all, an engaged and interactive reader along the lines of Adler and Van Doren (
How to Read a Book). And Ann Fadiman is a reader after my own heart (
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader). She was a marker of books; her husband was not. Like her, I hold books in high esteem, but they are NOT sacred objects unless LIVED in.
All of this is leading up to a discussion of my love of marginalia. I thoroughly enjoy reading the considered notes of prior readers of a text. I enjoy buying used books which bear the marks of their prior owners, flagging interesting and important sections, commenting on or taking issue with points made. I can even tolerate carefully made indelible entries, provided they are in a legible hand and are germane to the text.
But, I must admit that the inept, destructive, puerile marginalia one usually finds in many university library books irritates and often angers me. I have been know to spend hours pouring through books I have taken from the library carefully erasing the heavy handed pencil marks of readers whose only apparent thought was to gouge through as many layers of paper as they could with a pencil that could only have been sharpened with an axe.
But, I digress and---perhaps---I exaggerate.
The point I wanted to take up has to do with margins in texts and the role of marginalia. I believe it was in H.J. Jackson's book,
Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, that I first read about the depth of margins and their purpose: ample room for continuous annotation of the text. The idea intrigued me. And I was only too familiar with the grossly insufficient margins one finds in modern books and most academic journals. Having some experience at calligraphy and the copying of texts onto leaves of parchment by hand, I understood at a visceral and aesthetic level what I thought was the role of the margins: set off the "work of art" in a space of its own. But most manuscripts, while considered works of art today, were really utilitarian works designed to promulgate ideas. The margins set nothing off; they provided space for commentary and annotation.
I understood this intellectually after reading parts of Jackson's book and weighing his observations and research against my own practices of annotation and engagement and argument while reading. Of course most of the arguments were (and remain) one-sided. But it was not until Laurie and I went to the Scriptorium in Avranche, which holds the manuscript collection from Mont St. Michel, that I actually SAW layers of annotation and commentary filling the margins around a handwritten text. The specific leaves were from a book of legal precepts. The annotations and commentary reflected the subsequent interpretations and clarifications that accrued over time, in some cases over hundreds of years.
While the common of books today are not likely to survive as long as some of the manuscripts that have been preserved, it would be pleasing to know that one's marginalia inspired others to comment on one's comments, some of which might be commenting on those of others,
misé en abyme.
So . . . When you are through with your books, donate them to libraries, pass them on to others, trade them in at used bookstores, or release them to the wild; but do so always with your own thoughts recorded, neatly and in pencil, in the hopes others might engage with you down the way.
