Thoreau's annotated copy of Walden

I don't know how long this link will be available, but the video is worth a look while it's around on the Internet: http://ow.ly/m6SdX

Professor Gould of Middlebury College in Vermont talks about Thoreau's copy of his book, Walden, which she retrieves from the college's archives and shares with viewers in this interview. Her comments on Thoreau's marginalia underscore the scholarship inherent in such an historically important copy of this book.

But there's also a certain thrill-factor, which Professor Gould captures perfectly in her closing words:

"It's just glorious to be able to hold it in your hands because Thoreau held it in his hands, he made the notes, and it's as close to history as you can possibly get."

Prayers in Medieval Marginalia

I don't know that Eamon Duffy prayed he would find margin notes in the medieval books of hours, or prayer books, that he researched for his book, Marking the Hours: English People & Their Prayers 1240-1570 (Yale University Press, 2006), but medieval marginalia is what he hoped to find and did.

In America: The National Catholic Weekly, Thomas J. Shelley offers an informative review of Duffy's book. Summarizing the contents, he writes, with a quote from Duffy:

This book is an attempt, says Duffy with his customary wit, “to trace a history written quite literally in the margins.” 

Shelley expounds further:

These annotations provide a rare insight into the personal religious convictions of those who used the books daily to sustain their spiritual life. The fact that many of these laypeople were women adds an extra dimension of interest and originality to Duffy’s research. The book of hours was popular with such dissimilar characters as the unscrupulous King Richard III, hard-faced London grocers, pious country gentry, devout widows, St. Thomas More and even Thomas Cromwell, the ruthless royal minster who engineered More’s downfall and execution.

Prayers comprise the majority of the marginalia Duffy encountered in his research. Collectively, they offer valuable insight to the mindsets of people, primarily women, during medieval England. In turn, Duffy' book offers a valuable addition to the emerging field of scholarly research of marginalia.

Marginalia in poetry

The subject of marginalia is not just for scholarly studies, filmmakers, or whimsical blog posts (present company included most of the time). Marginalia has found its way into poetry. None other than Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003, included a poem titled,  Marginalia, in his poetry collections, Picnic Lightning (Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Press,1998) and Sailing Alone Around the Room (Random House, 2001). Here it is:

Marginalia, by Billy Collins

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

 

Writing in Books - The Film

From reeselife (a section of reesenews), a source of news about Chapel Hill and the University of North Carolina, here is an interesting film that explores the practice of marginalia or writing in books and its personal and cultural significance:

http://reesenews.org/2011/08/10/why-we-write-in-books/17627/

Nixon in the margins

A reader of this copy of the book, Nixon in the White House, by Rowland Evans, Jr. and Robert D. Novak (Random House, 1971), sees Watergate as having been inevitable, but that wasn't Nixon's biggest crime.

Between these covers, it's pretty obvious that one reader of this book felt very passionate about the subject and interacted rather intimately with the text, letting his emotions and feelings flow in annotated anger across many a page.

The reader's liberal use of a pencil to annotate this book--rather, what his annotations speak to--tells me the marginalia occurred after the scandal. That and the date of the book. Watergate hadn't hit the headlines yet.

The reader doesn't take long to crank up the marginalia. A page 7 reference to Donald Rumsfeld gets the pencil scratching across the paper with Rumsfeld's name underlined (reference to a phone call he shouldn't have received from Nixon) and the margin note "Security Risk!" But that's not the first notation you see. A summary of the book and the reader's opinion welcome you on the half-title page:

After reading this book, Watergate seemed inevitable. But Watergate is only the tip of the iceberg visible above the surface.

Treason is defined as giving aid to the enemy of a country. Communist Red China was our enemy in the Korean War. A deadly enemy still in the Vietnam War. Mr. Nixon put them on "The Most Favored Nations" list.

And this annotation is but the tip of the iceberg for the marginalia that occurs throughout this book. Marginalia and underlining.

Below are a few examples out of many that exist from this impassioned reader.

Somehow, during this reader's Nixonian annotation rants, Mr. Walter Knott of Knott's Berry Farm fame winds up in the marginalia. An interesting connection for later research, perhaps.

And if you're wondering how this reader held up over the long haul of reading this book, I assure you he was still going strong the last several of 410 pages. On pages 403 through 405, no less than three passages are once more marked with the word, "Treason," all pertaining to Nixon's relations with Communist China.

Further, the marginalia sometimes has a source other than a knee-jerk reaction from the reader; the annotation at times contains a citation for the source, (i.e., Wall Street Journal, Aug 1 1973). I'd venture a guess that this is an unusual practice in the art, if you will, of annotation and marginalia.

  

 

There you have just a taste of one reader's reaction to a period in US history that created such intense feelings as to cause a reader to relive it as it unfolded in this book, accuse President Nixon of treason, and write marginalia with a vision that only comes with hindsight.

Marginalia in a digital world

I found some interesting discussion on David Weinberger's blog Joho about the loss of handwritten marginalia in digital books. But not the loss of marginalia itself. Weinberger foresees highlighting and annotations flourishing in a digital format, perhaps even the dawning of a Golden Age of Marginalia.

The example used is the literary marginalia of famous authors, such as Twain or Kerouac--marginalia the average reader is unlikely to ever see. But it serves to illustrate a point about loss and gain.

Weinberger concedes it would indeed be a loss not to hold the book Kerouac held, read, and interacted with by transcribing his thoughts upon the text and margins of the page that inspired those thoughts. He uses the word "thrill" to describe the experience of handling a book containing such marginalia.

Ian Frazier used the word "sublime" in his New Yorker article on the same subject, albeit in a setting more conducive to using that word. It was Frazier's article that led to Weinberger's blog post. The distinction between "thrill" and "sublime" might parallel the distinction between attitudes toward traditional formats for literary matter. "Sublime" would certainly seem to connote an incomparably greater connection or attachment to the annotated codex than would "thrill."

Weinberger sees a trade-off looming, one that should actually be more beneficial to readers in the digital book arena. The potential to create digital marginalia, especially in a social reading environment, will negate (and then some) the loss of of an author's handwritten notes in the margins of the printed page. Specifically, Weinberger asserts:

We will gain the ability to learn from the digital traces left by all of today’s Kerouacs, Kerouac scholars, and Kerouac readers.

To that, I would add: As long as those digital traces can be read or accessed via whatever medium is currently in vogue. Will historically significant digital marginalia from the year 2016 survive more than 200 years as has the marginalia in John Adams' books, which are currently being shown around the country in a traveling exhibit? I pondered the ephemeral nature of all things digital in this Bibliophemera blog post last year.

An interesting thread of comments follow Weinberger's thought-provoking post (Joho link above).