3 days ago
Marginalia can sometimes add great value to a book
I recently bought a history of 19th-century France from a reputable second-hand books site, where its condition was described as 'very good'. When it arrived, I was dismayed to find it scrawled all over with underlinings, asterisks and marginal comments.
Fortunately, most of the annotations were in pencil and some busy work with an eraser got rid of the worst of them. Afterwards, I wondered why I had found these harmless marginalia so upsetting, and concluded that it was probably because I spent my childhood reading library books.
Now, writing in library books is pure vandalism – 'blood relative to that large-scale, public form of marginalia we call graffiti', as Kevin Jackson pointed out in his wonderful book Invisible Forms. But when it comes to annotating your own books, bibliophiles across the ages, from medieval monks to social-media book-fanciers, are all in favour: 'I consider as lovers of books those out all the margins with annotations of many kinds,' wrote the Renaissance philosopher Erasmus.
Half a millennium later, a growing community of BookTokkers and Bookstagrammers are taking Erasmus at his word, posting images of books embellished with pastel highlighting and marginal drawings of flowers and kittens, wantonly smeared with lipstick kisses, or neatly stuffed with colour-coded tabs (romance and romantasy are favourite genres for this treatment). For the novice marginalist, there are even helpful essays on how to get started: 'Think of it as connecting with either the author, the text, or even to yourself.'
For the author Ann Patchett, annotating her own text proved an unexpected way to connect with her readers. As she explained in her introduction to the annotated edition of Bel Canto, she was initially asked to annotate a copy of her 2023 novel Tom Lake as part of an auction to support an independent bookshop. As she worked, she 'saw patterns in the book I'd scarcely been aware of... it helped me clarify the way I write'. And so the idea formed to publish an annotated edition of Bel Canto.
Patchett is only the latest in a succession of authors whose marginalia serve to enrich rather than deface the texts they appear on. Ezra Pound's pithy scrawls on T S Eliot's The Waste Land ('Perhaps be damned') are familiar from the facsimile edition. But the most prolific and brilliant of all marginalists (according to Jackson) was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who is credited with introducing the word 'marginalia' to the English language in 1832. To lend your books to Coleridge was to have them returned, as his friend Charles Lamb wrote, 'enriched with annotations, tripling their value'.
We can trace a direct line of descent from Coleridge's marginalia to the social-media annotators who painstakingly embellish a copy of a friend's favourite novel as a gift. But the ancestry of those cute marginal kittens extends even further back, to around 1420, when a scribe from the Netherlands left a manuscript on his desk overnight.
A spreading stain, a Latin curse (Confundatur pessimus cattus qui minxit super librum istum in nocte...) and a furious marginal drawing of two accusing fingers pointing at a shifty-looking cat have ensured for the manuscript (now held at the Historiches Archiv in Cologne) a global fame and affection beyond the wildest dreams of an angry scribe pointing the marginal finger at a miscreant feline.
