Marginal Behavior: Book Graffiti

In “Marginal," featured in the June 28 issue of The New Yorker, Author Ian Frazier relays his experience at the New York Public Library event focused around marginalia, aka those markings sketched into the body, cover, and/or margins of books, what NYPL's Anne Garner calls "book graffiti." Of course, the library wasn’t displaying just any marginalia. Selected from the library’s collection were the in-text scribbles of literary giants like Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac, William Coleridge, and Vladimir Nabokov to name a few.

Image from here

 For designers, marginalia are probably best equated with one of our favorite ideas – the palimpsest. Great marginalia takes on a palimpsest-like quality – the layering of thoughts, intersections, and outside references that inform and reform the text in question. This is why ebooks for all their convenience are lost on me. Sure, a digital book is great for a beach read I never plan on picking up again, but for those texts that are important to me, a digital highlighter will never replace the physical act of underlining an exquisite sentence or marking a particularly convincing passage. (Sue Halpern speaks to the digital marginalia problem in "What the iPad Can't Do" on the New York Review of Books blog.)

Image from the New York Review of Books

The most serious marginalians I’ve known in my life were philosophers. I once noticed that my philosophy mentor, a certain Mr. Casey, having read everything on the planet at least half a dozen times, created a key with dates on the inside front cover for his marginalia, i.e. black ink for the first read, blue for the second, pencil the third, double underlines on the fourth, and so on.

As an interpretive device, marginalia inspires a certain kind of faith. When returning to a text weeks, months, or years later, I always glance at my marks to get a feel for my prior readings of the material. I’m no longer surprised when my marginalia seem to be written by someone else – someone better read in some instances, more naïve other times, or enamored with an idea for a reason inconceivable to me today.

Read Frazier’s piece and decide what sort of marginalia-maker you are (I’ll admit I enjoy hostile marginalia or what I’ll call satirical marginalia, but seeds of ideas and cross references fill most of my margins).
Do you have a good example of marginalia in your library? Send it in. Perhaps an online exhibition is in order.