One small thing I sometimes miss about real paper books is the ability to scribble in the margin. I’ve done this rarely with fiction books, although I have copied out beautiful quotes, especially when I was younger and still had hopes of achieving lovely handwriting through practice. With history, though, and other books I wanted to note and return to, I underlined, wrote thoughts, and sometimes even doodled. I had no qualms about defacing the books that belonged to me. They were mine, my own possessions to mark up at will, and marginalia has a long history. Some of the old books in my library have notes from generations long past, and what remains are these glimpses into their thoughts from before I was even a twinkle in my father’s eye. I treasure those scribbles, some less legible than others. But even simple underlining can illuminate another reader’s insights into what the author was saying.
Having switched largely to ebooks – how else could I practically carry a vast library on my person and be able to read anywhere at any time? Paper is simply no longer practical for my primary reading. I am still able to make my own marginal notes, linked to the next, I highlight passages, and I can easy grab quotes to share with social networks when I am moved to it. It’s not so easy to see the other readers, although I do have the ability to see what passages others have highlighted many times. I don’t know what algorithm dictates the number behind ‘many’ but it’s always interesting to be reading along and see the underlined passage that has caught eyes. As a writer, I look closely at those, curious to see what captured the imagination, and to speculate as to why those words, and how I might replicate that in my own writing.
I can, of course, always bring my own marginalia here – for what that means, which given I can’t keep a regular post schedule, isn’t much! – and share it with the world. But that’s somewhat divorced from the book. It isn’t the same as the spidery pencil marks on yellowed and brittle pages I have to photograph and enhance digitally to hopefully be able to read. Those are a tiny window into the past. A form of time-travel, if you will, every forward and never looking back. I like to look back, from whence we came, and use that to guide my own path into the future. Or to reflect on the turns life has taken, if I look at my own margins from teen years through young motherhood into the ‘now’ which is only a blip on the radar of my entire life, however that will look at the end. I can’t predict it, any more than I could have predicted where I would be standing now, from the past stance I jotted offhandedly in the edge of a book page.
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7 responses to “Marginalia”
I could not find an affordable Bible that had type big enough for my old eyes, with space enough for me to take notes, so I’m making one. Lots of copy and paste, lots of inserting footnotes. And I didn’t realize just how HUGE it was going to be. Still, the process makes for a good study session, so there’s that.
Annotated cookbooks are THE BEST! You can always tell which pages have the favored recipes on them, because they are stained rather badly.
Pat, are you familiar with eSword? It’s a Bible program you can download (or use on-line, but I prefer to download, so even if the internet is being wonky, I still have the program). You can make the font larger and easier to read, and there’s a pane for making your own notes. You can also highlight passages. It has search features, commentaries, dictionaries and concordances, and you can compare many versions of the Bible, too. One of my pastors introduced me to eSword years ago, and I use it constantly. The program itself is free, and many of the Bibles and other books available to add to it are also free; some require a small fee because of copyright laws. I’ve never felt like I needed any of those, but if your favorite Bible version is the NIV, for example, you’d need to pay a little bit for it.
Not familiar with that one. I’ve been using Bible Gateway.
My current project has me creating my own study Bible on regular letter-size paper, 14 point font. I need to live another mumble mumble years so I can mark it up enough so that one of my descendants will want it…
The best grade I ever received in law school was because of a used text book. It had been owned by three previous law students. All three were on the law review and one was the editor in chief. Their margin notes were pure gold. God bless you wielder of the pink highlighter because you helped me to an ‘A’.
I loved used textbooks for the price, but the notes were sometimes big bonuses!
Edgar Allan Poe was a marginalist, and his marginalia can be found collected in book or eBook form.
23 skidoo