BENGALURU: Perhaps the most touching instance of marginalia – the jottings or scribbles of readers found in books—is in the novel S by JJ Abrams and Dorst. Two readers – a man and a woman using the same library reference copy – meet and fall in love because they began reading each other’s margin notes. Not only do they discover each other, but they also stumble on a mystery that only marginalia can decode. S beautifully exemplifies the notion that reading each other’s marginalia can be a form of vital communication, a code or shortcut to someone’s mind and heart.
Perhaps the most famous book on the subject is HH Jackson’s Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. This bestseller made the study of margin notes popular, escalating an interest in marginalia. Jackson tells us that it was possibly Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Romantic poet, who first suggested the word ‘marginalia’ to refer to the exchange of notes between him and essayist Charles Lamb. They had a wonderful conversation going in the margins of books – each would borrow the same copy, and when it was returned to the other, the scribbles of both would be read.
The most recent book on margin jottings illustrates the intimacy and depth of even anonymous “leavings” in library books. Letter to a Future Lover by Ander Monson is an anthology of short essays on marginal inscriptions from borrowers of library books. The subtitle of the book says it all: “Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries.” Monson makes a striking point in one of the essays: Of the thousands of books in a library, you pick one, a heavy tome printed in the 19th century, and you realise as you hold it that the author has spent a lifetime researching and writing it. And yet if no one checks out the book, and it remains unread, so much labour has gone waste. And yet – and this is the glorious point he makes – if someone were to borrow it that very day and read it, suddenly the library has made it possible for that book to have a new life. And now if that reader were to scribble in the book and return it, the book’s life is extended. Monson notes: “What you write in response to the book – how you mark it up or how you take it with you and reproduce it – that’s a part of the book too.”
Marginalia becomes a collectible when it comprises annotations by a hand that belongs to a famous person. Bibliophiles often find books with the margin notes and scribbles of authors, artists, thinkers, activists, world leaders and so on. Imagine if you were to come upon an ordinary edition of a Physics textbook in a rare-book fair and open the pages to find Einstein’s pencil notes in the margins! One of the most prolific marginalists was Vladimir Nabokov. A collector came across an anthology of short stories once owned by this Russian-American master of prose. He discovered that Nabokov, who was also a renowned professor, had actually graded each story in the book with a B minus or C plus or just a B, and so on! Only two stories had an A plus: a Salinger story and a story by himself! Other famous margin-jotters have been John Donne, Ben Jonson, Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf.
But perhaps just as equally interesting are the margin notes of ordinary, anonymous, previous owners or readers of a secondhand book. Very often there is violent disagreement – “No! No way!” – or sometimes hearty approval – “Absolutely true!” In Used Books by William Sherman, he asks: what if we saw the marginalia of readers from previous centuries? Would they not reveal a lot about how ordinary people felt and thought then?
The marginalia of today’s reader is most likely found not scribbled in the physical copy of a book but instead as ‘shared’ comments on social media platforms. What is lost is the visibility of handwritten notes. We know that Kindle itself now provides for margin notes, so we have to factor in digital marginalia as well. The thrill of marginalia seems to me to be that it is private, quiet, uncommented on. Once you’ve shared it with others digitally, they are not personal anymore.
Critic Sam Anderson writing in the New York Magazine said that marginalia were “not just to passively read but to fully enter a text, to collaborate with it, to mingle with an author on some kind of primary textual plane.” Not everyone likes to scribble inside books, though. Some are horrified at the thought. The famous children’s book illustrator Maurice Sendak once recounted a funny incident. He was in a bookshop signing copies of his book that children were bringing to him, and one boy said he didn’t want Sendak to sign it as it would spoil the book! Sendak readily agreed and gave the book back to him without daring to autograph it!
It was Ann Fadiman who said all readers are made up of only two classes: Those who scribble in books and those who don’t. Those who make margin notes turn the whole exercise into a conversation. It could become an argument between the reader and the writer. Or just the reverse: A dialogue between the writer and the reader.
The author is a technologist based in Silicon Valley, USA, and is gently mad about books.