Francis Bacon once remarked, “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”
What better way to chew and digest a book than marginalia? Throughout my school life, I had made do with second-hand textbooks. And if the margin of the book had an “imp” next to it, or a paragraph enveloped in parentheses, it meant one more reading of the same. It didn’t matter if the other person had scored better. It just meant that someone found it important enough to make an annotation, and it must be important. I added my own inputs before I gave them over to someone else. But then my additions were mostly doodles. That often reflected how bored I was in most of my classes!
What is marginalia (mär-jə-ˈnā-lē-ə)?
The dictionary meaning of Marginalia means:
- marginal notes or embellishments (as in a book)
- nonessential items. Example: the meat and marginalia of American politics.
Medieval manuscripts often had curious images and drawings of rabbits, cats, and snails combined with an elaborate and illustrative style of writing.
Marginalia reminds us that reading is rarely passive. Reading and writing go hand-in-hand. In the margins, we argue, agree, question, and discover that we can connect ideas and decode jargon.
The term “Etymology” is the study of the origin of words. The practice of etymology is uncovering the truth by tracing the root of a word and its evolution thereafter.
So, where does marginalia come from?
In the introduction to his essay titled “Marginalia,” Edgar Allan Poe wrote: “In getting my books, I have always been solicitous of an ample margin; this not so much through any love of the thing in itself, however agreeable, as for the facility it affords me of penciling suggested thoughts, agreements and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general.” The essay was published in 1844, and the term marginalia was only a few decades old, despite notes in the margins of texts having existed for centuries. There is supposed to be another word apostille (or apostil). It refers to a single annotation made in a margin, but that word is rarely used today.
So, even if you are not a Poe and not too keen to scribble in your own books, marginalia are a sure-shot sign that someone has read that before you. While researching, I found that there are many notable books based on marginalia. I haven’t read any of them, but now I am truly tempted to after coming across them. I am giving a few examples below.
- by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst (2013): This is perhaps the most famous contemporary example. The book consists of a novel (Ship of Theseus by a fictional author, V.M. Straka) with extensive, handwritten notes, postcards, and maps left in the margins by two readers, Jennifer and Eric, who are trying to solve a mystery surrounding the author.
2. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (1962): Comprised of a 999-line poem by John Shade, a foreword, and a long commentary by a shady academic, Charles Kinbote, the entire story is told through the critical notes that gradually reveal a completely different, unreliable narrative in the margins.
(I couldn’t find the link for this book online)
3. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (2000): Known for its unconventional layout, this horror novel features a narrative that is constantly interrupted by footnotes, which in turn have their own footnotes, forcing the reader to navigate a claustrophobic, annotated, and layered text.
4. Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg (2018): A novel within a novel that utilizes extensive footnotes from a “transgender historian” to annotate and argue with the 18th-century autobiography of a thief.
The excerpt from How to Read a Book, written in the 40s, captures the necessity of marginalia in reading.
When you buy a book, you establish a property right in it, just as you do in clothes or furniture when you buy and pay for them. But the act of purchase is actually only the prelude to possession in the case of a book. Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it— which comes to the same thing— is by writing in it.
But then, it is difficult to give away our books, and the marginalia remains a librarian’s nightmare.
But then, are you the kind who loves to annotate, doodle, and believe in marginalia even if you didn’t know the term for it before? Would love to hear from you.
hosted by Cindy D’Silva and Noor Anand Chawla.
sources:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/marginalia
Image: Created with the help of AI.
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