Something every reader has an opinion about is marginalia. Do you dare mark up the printed page? And what about when you buy a previously owned book, must it look as though it was never read or do you love to buy books that have been well loved?
I came across an article at Fast Company today A Kindle Designer’s Touching Online Memorial to The Marginalia Scribbled in Books. The article talks about Eric Scmitt who helped design the graphic interface for the first Kindle. He is a collector of marginalia which seems like a fun thing to collect. To my horror, however, he doesn’t save the book entire, but slices out the marked up pages he wants to keep with an X-Acto knife. WTF? I’m still a bit faint and trying really hard to not hyperventilate over that bit. Maybe I’m wrong, but isn’t part of marginalia the whole book package you find it in? Doesn’t taking it out of the context of that particular book risk losing the charm and pleasure of it?
The “touching memorial” ends up being a website Schmitt started in order to share his marginalia finds. The Pages Project is an interesting idea and Schmitt invites page submissions. The design of the website is at first look kind of cool but not reader friendly in my opinion. In fact, I think some of the continuing faintness I feel is because of the website making me dizzy.
Schmitt does realize the irony in his helping create a device that is chipping away at the existence of the marginalia he loves. He does worry about how digital “marginalia” will be preserved because at this point there is no real way to save it without actively taking steps to do so. Who among us is going to take the time to do that? I know I won’t. That makes me a little sad because I love opening books I read a long time ago and marked up. I love rereading them and adding to the commentary of previous years. But with the ebooks I have read? Not going to happen unless I manage to preserve that same exact ebook and the notes file across ereaders as the years go by. And even if I manage such a thing, whose to say that in 20 years the files will still be readable because of changes in technology and formatting? It’d be like trying to retrieve a file you saved on a floppy disk in 1989. Good luck!
I am not the best or most active marginalia writer. I find some books easier to mark up than others. Some books require it. I marked up Ulysses like crazy when I read it and would not have been able to get through it otherwise. Other books invite me to make comments. Proust is one of those as well as Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen. Other books I fear would scream if I should ever touch a pencil to the page. For Some Reason Margaret Atwood falls here which is weird because I am sure she would encourage scribbling with abandon.
Marginalia isn’t dead yet. As long as there are print books there will be people who write in them. But it is certainly an activity that is becoming less common. If it ever does disappear, would you miss it?
In a blog I wrote on Marginalia I concluded:
It’s (Marginalia) a matter of becoming involved in the text and thinking about it and while that is sometimes a time-consuming process, it is made a little easier by putting your thoughts down on the page so you can recapture them later. Reading a book may take days or weeks, but that is sometimes only the beginning of thinking about it. Collecting marginal notes in a commonplace book enables you to keep the reading experience alive and make the most of its lingering after effects.
The blog is here: http://marksinthemargin.blogspot.com/2011/02/on-marginalia.html
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Richard, yes, but marginalia and a commonplace book are two different things. Marginalia travels with the book and a commonplace book does not. I have marginalia from four different readings of Pride and Prejudice, a mass market paperback that is looking a little ragged. I love this book all the more for it. Copying out my notes and passages into a separate notebook would remove them from the book itself and leave my pleasure a little bit less the next time I decide to read P&P. I think marginalia and a commonplace book serve two different needs and purposes.
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Yes, I agree Stefanie. And it’s tedious because you have to note the page reference so that you know to what part of the book your notes refer. I write marginalia but then hate lending my book that have marginalia for fear others will think they are silly, because they are. They’re not very erudite!
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Prostration of idiocy before friends can be endearing. But it’s hard to tell. I lent my copy of The Castle to a neighbour whom I worried might see me in a lesser light. He hasn’t mentioned my inane scribbles, but neither has he come back with a searingly insightful analysis of his own. Or maybe he’s too embarrassed to raise the book at all and for reasons that he’ll carry to his grave? Bearing in mind that it’s Kafka, I suppose he does have the right to remain silent.
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Heh, Jeff, maybe your neighbor was so awed by your marginalia he felt he had nothing to contribute in return? 🙂
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All I can say is that I’m a philosopher who went to Durham and he’s an economist who went to the LSE. Whatever that means.
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Prostrations of idiocy before friends can be endearing! Love it Jeff!
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LOL, I know what you mean about not wanting to lend books you’ve written in. I lent one once to a friend, a psychology kind of book, and I had totally forgotten what I had written in it and discovered later I had made a note “This sounds like C” and my friend of course saw it and thankfully it made her laugh because she left a very funny comment in the margin under my note!
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I’m presuming your friend was C! How fun she commented back!
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One of the thrills of my dissertation research at the Folger was finding an obscure 18th-century satire with marginal notes by Robert Southey.
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Yes, I would miss it. I went through a phase of scribbling in books – especially if they were books I disagreed with! Other books such as novels or poetry I kind of treated as sacred space. Marginalia can give added value to a book but can also be a bit of a pain in the ass and a distraction.
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Ian, heh, I love to scribble in books I disagree with! I like how you call your scribbling a phase. Is it something you consider having grown out of? Or did it serve a need at one time and for whatever reason you don’t need to do it any longer? I agree, marginalia can be a pain/distraction. I don’t mind my own but I don;t always appreciate the notes of other people.
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It was probably a need to show off!
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Jeanne, what a fun discovery! Makes me giddy just thinking about it!
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I don’t write in books much anymore. I did in school and I still do when I take a CLE course that comes with a book. Then it’s all scritch, scritch, scritch – fast and furious. But I often find used cookbooks and I absolutely love finding little things jotted down in them. My favorite was a little cookbook the cook at a children’s home bought in 1914. It had her little margin notes on what worked and how she changed the recipe. The best thing was, after all those years long past, I found a four-leaf clover she had pressed into the book. Moments like those are golden.
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Grad, your cookbook finds sound marvelous! A four-leaf clover! Bookman scrawls all over his cookbooks making changes to the recipes. He is so hard on the books though I doubt they will ever make it into anyone else’s hands!
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You know, I love the notion of marginalia, but I never ever scribble in my own books. For one thing, I can never think of anything significant enough to feel worthy of defacing the page; and for another thing, the margins aren’t big enough anyway for me to say the things I’d want to. But I do feel the loss of it as a practice — it’s an interesting light on the readers who came to the book before you (including, of course, the past versions of you who also read it).
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Jenny, margins are definitely not big enough, I agree! I not write copious notes in the margins when I mark up a book but it would be nice if there was just a bit more space so I could write a little bigger and neater!
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I’ve found margins vary greatly. The trade paperbacks usually have pretty good margins, but older classics, small format paperbacks often have narrow ones. I hate them.
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You are right, margins to vary quite a lot. Hard covers tend to have fairly generous margins but who can afford to buy them all the time? Mass markets are the worst though!
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Oh yes, I didn’t even mention hard covers. I tend to prefer trade paperbacks to them anyhow just because they are a little lighter and easier to manage. Hate the smaller mass pbs though.
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I used to scribble in all my books until a) I started taking notes with an iPad, and b) I started selling secondhand ones as a volunteer. Now all my notes are at least searchable. It’s also possible to not view your notes when re-reading, so you can start without perpetually contaminating any new responses with old ones. On the other hand, as you say, there is a digital conservation question.
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Jeff, ah but I want me old notes to “contaminate” my rereading! They recall my previous reading experiences with the book and they all get wrapped up in the new one which I find a very enjoyable thing.
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Aye, depends on your needs at the time I suppose. I’ve used Sente extensively, so the comments, though dated, are presented all together, or not if you choose not. Useful for recapping when revisiting papers. Don’t know what the facilities are like on ereaders. The Amazon iPad app isn’t too bad.
Has anyone mentioned here yet that a book full of scribbles and highlighting does make one look rather learned if those scribbles and highlights are in different pen colours that show much re-reading. Actually, maybe there’s a case for filling up something epic with writing random and cryptic notes just to impress!
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heh, I will have to start using different pen colors when rereading! Actually, I usually use a red pencil but maybe I need to branch out and use different colors? Red for the first reading, green for the second, blue for the third, etc.
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Oh Stefanie, I nearly fainted when I saw that he did surgery to his scribble findings…I’m going to check out the website, it sounds like it could be a really great idea! Sad that the site is not reader friendly, maybe he needs a web editor! I have a funny story that you reminded me of when you mentioned that he took an X-acto knife to books. It doesn’t have much to do with marginalia, but only because I try to refrain from writing in library books. I graduated college with a double major in Italian and English from a major university in Philadelphia. I had an advanced italian literature course that focused on the country’s nobel prize in literature winners i.e. Pirandello, Carducci, and Deledda, etc. I would do what I could to save money on books by borrowing them from the library, and my university’s library had a lot of italian literature collecting dust on the shelf. Maria Deledda’s ‘Il Madre’ was one of these books I borrowed from the library….Jump forward a few years, I attended a white elephant gift exchange for christmas with friends and I happened to pick a gift that was a good sized blue book, I opened up the first few pages and to my astonishment it was the exact copy of Deledda’s ‘Il Madre’ that I borrowed from the library, my friend must’ve gotten it from the free bin. I sat there delighting in the italian I was reading till…voila…..there was a gaping hole carved out with a knife in the pages of the book. My friend made a hollow book in which you could hide something. The entire book was ruined. I was devastated.
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Sam, I know, isn’t it terrible? I can hear the books screaming. And what a story you have about Il Madre! How thrilling to have found the very book! I can imagine how completely devastated you were on your discovery of it being carved out! How heart heartbreaking!
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I would miss marginalia terribly, both my own and others. I mostly only mark up nonfiction, often to question it or argue with it, and like you, I love to go back and revisit old feelings. Have you read Ship of Theseus? It’s an ode to marginalia. I started it earlier this year, loved it, but was too busy (it’s a book that takes time and space to read), so I stopped reading it and am saving it for my New Year’s vacation this year.
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Emily, I like to argue with nonfiction too! I have not heard of Ship of Theseus but I have gone to look it up and it sounds marvelous! I’ve added it to my library list. Hopefully I will be able to get to it next year 🙂
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Glad you managed to find it because I just realized I called it by the book within the book’s title and not it’s real title “S”.
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heh, yup. I was confused at first but it wasn’t so very hard to figure out 🙂
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Woah, that website does bad things to my vision! Swoony indeed. But marginalia displayed like that loses all its meaninfulness for me, because location and context are all. I write in all books that I study in depth, as I really appreciate my own comments years/months/whatever later when I return to them. Without them I wouldn’t know what it was I thought on a first read though, and it’s good to know when each reading is different. As you know, I’m still really a paper person, and not about to give that up any time soon! (Though kindles et al are very good indeed for certain things, like commuting).
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Litlove, doesn’t it though? I agree, location and context make marginalia so much more meaningful. I would love to paw through your books and marginalia! 🙂
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I never used to mark up my books–gasp at the idea. But now I don’t mind making a few notations–it really helps when I go back later to look something up or write a post or just remember what I was thinking at the time I was reading. I couldn’t use a pen (and I hate bying used books that have pen markings or highlights!), but a few discrete notes are good. I do miss being able to do that when reading an ebook, which I now do on occasion on the ipad I use–as I often read at the gym I can’t make any sort of notes (I will take a pencil with me and can do so in paper books, though those always look a little wobbly). It’s sort of like emails–I don’t always keep them either and it is a little sad to think of none of that being saved for later.
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