On Marginalia, or Reading with a Pencil

The first book I ever wrote in was a second-hand copy of a poetry anthology. Someone before me had underlined a single line on page forty, and next to it, in pencil so faint it was almost a rumour, had written yes. I have never forgotten that word. It was not an argument or a gloss. It was a reader recognising something, and leaving a mark so that the recognition would outlast the moment.

This essay is about those marks — what they are for, why we have mostly stopped making them, and whether a personal website can be a kind of margin.

A short history of writing back

Readers have always written in books. Medieval scribes added glosses between the lines; Renaissance humanists filled margins with cross-references and corrections; nineteenth-century readers pasted in clippings and argued with authors who were already dead.¹ The margin was never empty space. It was where the second half of the reading happened.

The Chinese commentary tradition makes this explicit. A classic is rarely read alone; it arrives wrapped in layers of commentary, sub-commentary and annotation, so that the page itself becomes a conversation across centuries. When Confucius is quoted as saying 「学而不思则罔，思而不学则殆」 — learning without thinking is bewildering, thinking without learning is perilous — the line has already passed through two thousand years of readers telling each other what it means.

The Japanese essay as margin

Japanese literature has a genre that feels like marginalia grown into a book: the zuihitsu, or “following the brush”. Kenkō opens his Essays in Idleness by admitting that he is just writing down whatever passes through his mind:

つれづれなるままに、日暮らし、硯にむかひて、心にうつりゆくよしなし事を、そこはかとなく書きつくれば、あやしうこそものぐるほしけれ。

With nothing better to do, I sit all day before my inkstone, jotting down whatever trifling thoughts drift through my mind — and it is a strange, almost maddening feeling.

That is as good a description of a personal website as I know.²

What a margin does

When I look through the books I have annotated, the marks fall into a handful of kinds. They are not equally useful, and they age very differently.

Mark	What it records	Ages well?
Underline	“This mattered”	Poorly — rarely says why
Marginal note	A reaction, an objection	Well, if it is a full sentence
Cross-reference	A link to another page or book	Very well
Question mark	Confusion	Surprisingly well
Index on the endpaper	A personal table of contents	Best of all

The last of these is the one I trust most. A list on the inside cover — p. 12 fear of forgetting, p. 87 the river again — is a reader building their own map of a book. It is also, I realised recently, exactly what a tag page on a blog tries to be.

Forgetting, measured

Part of why we annotate is that we forget. Ebbinghaus’s old forgetting curve models how much of something we retain after time t, given a stability S that grows each time we revisit it:

$$R=e^{-\frac{t}{S}}$$

A margin note is a way of raising S cheaply. The second time you read the page, you are not reading alone: your earlier self has already left directions.

Keeping marks in plain text

I now keep most of my notes as plain text files, one per book, so that they survive whatever application I happen to be using. A small script pulls out every line that starts with a page number:

import re
from pathlib import Path

PAGE = re.compile(r"^p\.\s*(\d+)\s+(.*)")

def marks(path: Path):
    """Yield (page, note) pairs from a reading-notes file."""
    for line in path.read_text(encoding="utf-8").splitlines():
        if m := PAGE.match(line):
            yield int(m[1]), m[2]

for page, note in sorted(marks(Path("notes/kenko.txt"))):
    print(f"{page:>4}  {note}")

It is not clever, but it means that ten years from now I will still be able to read my own margins.³

A website as a margin

So what would a website look like if it took the margin seriously? A few things, I think:

1. It would let notes sit beside the text rather than below it.
2. It would treat languages as equals on the page, without forcing one script into the shape of another.
3. It would make cross-references cheap and visible.
4. It would be quiet enough that the writing, not the design, is what you remember.

Anne Fadiman once divided readers into “courtly lovers”, who keep their books pristine, and “carnal lovers”, who write in them, bend them and crack their spines (Fadiman 1998). This site is an attempt to be a carnal lover of its own pages.

References

• Fadiman, Anne. 1998. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Jackson, H. J. 2001. Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Footnotes

1. H. J. Jackson’s Marginalia (2001) is the standard account in English, and is itself a pleasure to annotate. ↩

2. The translation here is my own loose paraphrase, not a published one. ↩

3. “Plain text” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. UTF-8, one file per book, no proprietary sync. ↩