Marginalia

Marginalia are the notes readers write in the margins of the books they read: underlinings, exclamations, cross-references, arguments, and the small copied-out passages that catch the eye. The word entered English in the nineteenth century, but the practice is as old as writing on codices — Greek and Latin manuscripts carry marginalia from antiquity, and medieval books are sometimes better known through their glosses than through their main texts.

There are two great kinds of marginalia. The private kind is a reader's dialogue with the book: a working record of what they noticed, what they disagreed with, and what they wanted to remember. The public kind — Coleridge's marginalia are the great English example — is a form of authorship, published later as a work in its own right. Both kinds together form one of the richest and most under-used archives in literary history.

For the modern reader, marginalia are a discipline. Marking a book while reading — a light underline, a marginal N.B., a copied passage in a notebook — turns a passive read into an active one and creates, over years, a private index into a personal library. Books read without marks are books largely forgotten.

The taboo against writing in books is a nineteenth-century development, tied to the rise of the mass-produced pristine volume. Before that, and again now among serious readers, marginalia are considered part of the book's afterlife. Library books are, of course, another matter.