Marginalia
>> Saturday, February 26, 2011
When I was a young teen and starting to read more voraciously than ever I ran into a problem. I had precious little money to spend on books and it certainly wasn't enough to keep up with my literary appetite.
My sister and our close friend Jessie often read the same books at the same time. There was no money in either family to buy books in threes and so what we did was see who would pay for just one copy. As our days were spent mostly in each other's company we were able to share that one book, passing it between the three of us.
It was then that we discovered a clever way of experiencing the book together. We would, each in turn, write in the margins of said book or make doodles. Sometimes the notes merely pointed out what we found funny, profound or satisfyingly romantic. Other times the notes took on a philosophical tone. As the book was passed along we would each write our own marginalia and comment on what was previously written.
The books holding these notes became treasures, personalized by our thoughts, written there as neighbors to the original text. Often we would re-read these books months or years later and marvel at how we had changed or laugh at our doodles and jokes. We began to date the marginalia as we started to put in new notes. Through this process these books became more precious than ever.
Now that me, my sister and Jessie have grown and have money to buy our own books the marginalia has come to a stop. I will sometimes write a little note next to a text but usually only as a reminder to myself about how I interpreted it.
When I saw this article, though, I decided that my books needed far more marking up. Who knew that others had discovered the same mysterious way of communicating with other readers that my sister, Jessie and I had? A way of communicating that has a magic that Facebook, Twitter or email can ever replace.
Though not quite the same, I was happy to discover that my Kindle ebook reader had a feature for highlighting and making notes on passages and that these could be shared with other Kindle users.
As long as there are creative readers out there who have opinions about what they are reading I doubt that the phenomenon of marginalia will never die.
3 comments:
I thought I was the only one who'd write up in the book's margins and who wasn't a student.
Have you read Helene Hanff's '84 Charing Cross Road'? I seem to remember she liked to do it, too :-)
And we have 2 wandering fiendish copies of P&P&Z which we've all been adding marginalia to (mostly sarcastic) - i've got one copy at present - if you'd like to play, e-mail or DM me your address & I'll send it on to you. :-)
When I lived in Rapid City & worked in the historian's office I took a museum course on restoring and protecting books. One of the items we got to work on was an almanac. Back in the 1800's the people, usually women, would use the almanac from the year before and turn it into a journal. They would paste in recipes and letters and articles from the news paper. Make notes next to weather forecasts (how close or how off they were) and gardening tips and family news. Other family members would also add notations, etc. They were wonderful to see but very hard to find. I would give anything to have one of my own.
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