Dartmouth College Library Bulletin - Journey's End - Marginalia

Dartmouth College Library Bulletin
Journey's End

MARGINALIA

A RECENT reference question afforded us the opportunity to re-examine a number of volumes in Dartmouth's extensive Huxley collection. This body of monographs, first printings, and manuscript material was, in the main, a gift of Richard Mandel 1926. The object of the reference query was Huxley's novel Crome Yellow.[1] The subject of the query was the identity of the fictional character Jenny in the book. Dartmouth's copy of this novel, a gift of the Class of 1919 in memory of Louis A. Stone and Edward Warnke, is unique in that it was once owned by Oliver Sylvain Baliol Brett, third viscount Esher, and bears his armorial bookplate on the front pastedown. In a penciled note on the first flyleaf, Lord Esher explains, 'Jenny in this book is my sister Dorothy.' Dorothy Eugenie Brett was then living in Taos, New Mexico, and working as an artist. The student seeking the identity of Huxley's fictional character was satisfied and we were led to ponder the use of white space in books.

It was Coleridge who first used the term marginalia, in 1832, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED, available in both a printed format and online via the Dartmouth College Information System, also provides information on variants of marginalia such as annotations, postillae, glosses, and scholiae. All refer in one way or another to the notes entered on the white spaces of a page by a reader commenting on the text.

In a splendid essay published last year, Robert McCrum examines the library of Graham Greene as it was being cataloged for sale.[2] McCrum notes that many writers have left much larger collections, but that Greene's was important for another reason. He states that 'what is different about Greene's library is the wealth of personal annotation' in nearly every book. Further, 'Greene's annotated library . . . gives the literary detective vital clues to aspects of his life.'[3] McCrum shows the importance of a close examination of an author's library, not only for the titles it holds, but also for the notes, the marginalia, that can be found.

Within Dartmouth's collections are two literary libraries that are more or less complete. The first is that of the British poet Rupert Brooke (1887-1915), who died on the Greek island of Skyros while on active service in the Royal Navy. This collection, although small, is of great interest and importance as it represents the library of a brilliant young poet at the beginning of this century.[4] As a resource for the study and understanding of Brooke and his era, this library is vital and merits further examination by a student or scholar. The second library is that of the American novelist Kenneth Roberts (1885-1957). This collection is radically different in both size and scope from that of the young Brooke. Roberts, as many will recall, was a most exacting historical novelist whose novels of the French and Indian War and the American Revolution are correct in all historical detail. His collection of books reflects his interests and research needs. Many of the books are very rare and nearly all are heavily annotated. It is possible to read one of Roberts's novels and then go to the sources to see where and how he found the facts incorporated into the fiction.

The study of marginalia is certainly not a new phenomenon, but there has been renewed interest in recent years with the renewed interest in the history of the book and the history of texts. Marginalia provides a great deal of information on the use of a particular book or group of books. This has led to a number of recent publications that we have found to be of more than passing interest:

Stoddard, Roger E. Marks in Books, Illustrated and Explained (Cambridge: Houghton Library, Harvard University, 1985).
The illustrated catalog of a fascinating exhibition held at the Houghton Library, this volume is both intellectually stimulating and visually exciting.

Annotation and Its Texts , edited by Stephen A. Barney (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
This is a delightful collection of essays on a variety of writers, texts, and problems in annotation, well-reviewed in both scholarly and popular literature.

Camille, Michael. Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Camille examines and re-examines the edges (literally and figuratively) of medieval art to see what new information and interpretation can be gained from this review.

'Commentary as Cultural Artifact,' South Atlantic Quarterly, 91:4 (Fall, 1992).
A special issue of the journal, edited by Lee Patterson and Stephen G. Nichols 1958, devoted to a series of provocative essays on glosses, marginalia, and commentary.

Tribble, Evelyn B. Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993).
This volume is important for its concern for both print and manuscript in a period of transition.

There are, to be sure, transcriptions and studies of the marginalia of specific authors. Several that we have found fascinating include:

Piozzi, Hester Lynch. Piozzi Marginalia, Comprising Some Extracts from Manuscripts of Hester Lynch Piozzi and Annotations from Her Books, edited by Percival Merritt (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1925).
As with many polymaths, the annotations in Piozzi's books are as revealing as her manuscripts.

Stern, Virginia F. Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia, and Library (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).
A fascinating examination of both the library and the marginalia of the seventeenth-century Cambridge poet and legal scholar.

Carlyle, Books and Margins: Being a Catalogue of the Carlyle Holdings in the Norman and Charlotte Strause Carlyle Collection and the University Library with a Transcription of Carlyle's 'Marginalia' in John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy and an Interpretative Essay Thereon, University of California, Santa Cruz, University Library Bibliographical Series, No. 3 (Santa Cruz: University Library, University of California, 1980).
The title is tedious, the marginalia is not. This is one of the better attempts to reproduce the margial comments of one major author upon another.

Erasmus, Desiderius. Erasmus' Annotations on the New Testament: the Gospels: Facsimile of the Final Latin Text (1535) With All Earlier Variants (1516, 1519, 1522, 1527), edited by Anne Reeve; introduction by M. A. Screech; calligraphy by Patricia Payn (London: Duckworth, 1986).
The annotations and marginal comments of this Reformation scholar on the text of the New Testament are of great importance in the history of Biblical scholarship. This volume is also a good example of the difficulties involved in reproducing marginalia on the printed page.

We would be remiss in our duties if we did not remind readers that annotating texts and creating marginalia are only to be done in books that one owns oneself. No matter the intent, annotating library books or the books of others is considered a destructive rather than a constructive act.

P. N. C.

[1] London: Chatto and Windus, 1921.

[2] 'A Life in the Margins,' The New Yorker, (11 April 1994), 46-55.

[3] McCrum, 'Life,' 46.

[4] See Philip N. Cronenwett, 'Rupert Brooke and the Brooke Collection,' Dartmouth College Library Bulletin , n.s., 22:1 (November, 1981), 25-27, for notes on the acquistion of Brooke's library.

The Marginal Obsession with Marginalia - New Yorker

Posted by Mark O'Connell

“In getting my books,” Edgar Allan Poe wrote in 1844, “I have always been solicitous of an ample margin; this is not so much through any love of the thing in itself, however agreeable, as for the facility it affords me of penciling in suggested thoughts, agreements, and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general.” It’s a sentiment that a certain type of reader might be inclined to endorse by underlining, asterisking, or even scrawling “yes!” in the adjacent margin. Such readers feel that they aren’t really giving a book their full attention unless they’re hovering over it with a pencil, poised to underline or annotate at the slightest provocation. George Steiner memorably defined an intellectual as “quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.” Its admirable pithiness aside, the quip’s popularity probably has a lot to do with its egalitarian spirit: you don’t need to be able to give a detailed account of Heidegger’s ontology or have published a monograph on Proust to gain access to the club; you just have to keep a nicely sharpened HB in your hand as you read. (I tend to slot mine behind my right ear, carpenter style; I like to think this lends a somewhat rough-and-ready aspect to my appearance as I sit reading “Middlemarch” on the bus home.)

Marginalia have always been at the center of serious reading, but they have a place, too, at the margins of literary history. For a 2010 Talk of the Town piece, Ian Frazier wrote about a trip he took to the New York Public Library to view the annotated former possessions of various literary luminaries. He took particular note of a copy of Thoreau’s “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” which had been borrowed by Jack Kerouac from a local library in 1949, never to be returned. On page 227, Frazier noted a short sentence Kerouac had underlined in pencil, putting a “small, neat check mark beside it.” The sentence: “The traveler must be born again on the road.” In a copy of “Fifty-five Short Stories from The New Yorker, 1940-1950” once owned by Nabokov, he observed that the former Cornell literature professor had taken the trouble to give each story a grade, neatly penciled in beside its title in the table of contents. Only two stories in the anthology were awarded an A+ grade: J. D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and Nabokov’s own “Colette.” It’s not terribly surprising that this particular teacher was his own pet; those lower down the honor role might have taken comfort from bearing in mind that this was a guy who described the work of T. S. Eliot and Thomas Mann as, respectively, “second-rate” and “asinine.”

There has recently been a slight but noticeable escalation of interest in marginalia, partly because of the way in which the Internet has cultivated readers’ enthusiasm for discussion of their own reading practices and peculiarities, and partly because of a preëmptive nostalgia for the book as a tangible (and scrawlable) object at a time of increasing e-reader ubiquity. On the Open Letters Monthly site a couple of weeks ago, Lisa Peet wrote about the exhibition of Samuel Beckett’s original “Watt” manuscript at the Harry Ransom Center, in Texas. She took issue, sensibly, with the Center’s description of Beckett’s marginal doodlings as a “luminous secular relic,” insisting that his surprisingly accomplished cartoons “don’t need to be elevated to high art to be appreciated.” She declared her fascination with marginalia, with what she called “the voyeurism of seeing someone’s handwriting and doodles, even as I have to wonder—especially with posthumous archival collections—what the writers in question would have thought about having their stream-of-consciousness scribbles put up for such scrutiny.” On The Guardian’s books blog earlier this month, the former Faber & Faber editor-in-chief Robert McCrum was inspired, while remembering a piece he wrote in 1994 for The New Yorker about Graham Greene’s richly annotated personal library, to ask whether such scrawling was a sin for us mere mortals. He admitted that he himself was happy to write all over proof copies and paperbacks, but that he was generally loath to defile a nice hardback. He also posed (without trying to answer) the question “What happens to marginalia in the age of the Kindle?”

The New York Times Magazine critic at large Sam Anderson is much less circumspect than McCrum. For a while now, he has been a high-profile authority on the theory and practice of book defacement. In 2010, he contributed a much talked-about piece to The Millions called “A Year in Marginalia.” An ingenious variation on the site’s annual “Year in Reading” series, the post consisted of photos of jottings in books Anderson had read during that year. It’s almost certain that Anderson’s is the only copy of “Madame Bovary” to feature the word “Motherfuck!” neatly pencilled in the margin of the novel’s last page.

Earlier this month, Anderson reprised the “Year in Marginalia” idea for the Times (with added online multimedia content), and last year he published an interesting “Riff” on the topic. Here he characterized writing in books as a way “not just to passively read but to fully enter a text, to collaborate with it, to mingle with an author on some kind of primary textual plane.” He also laid out his fantasy about how e-books might lead to a new golden age in marginalia, whereby readers could share their own electronic jottings and read those of others:

    This, it seems to me, would be something like a readerly utopia. It could even (if we want to get all grand and optimistic) turn out to be a Gutenberg-style revolution—not for writing, this time, but for reading. Book readers have never had a mechanism for massively and easily sharing their responses to a text with other readers, right inside the text itself.

This enthusiasm for an underpraised form of writing is infectious, and he makes a compelling case for marginalia-sharing as a means of giving readers’ observations more currency in the literary exchange. But I think he underestimates the extent to which most readers value annotations precisely because they are a private exchange between themselves and whatever book they happen to be talking back to. Personally, I get slightly edgy when people pick paperbacks off my shelves and flick through them; there’s something slightly mortifying about anybody else reading these earnest or facetious marginal interjections (“V. interesting, this!,” “Austen can really write!,” or “Sure, whatever, Wittgenstein…”)

The Kindle allows for electronic marginalia via the “notes” function, but it feels all wrong: something about having to call up a menu and type a note on the keypad, with its little stud-like plastic buttons, makes the whole process seem forced and contrived. Marginalia are supposed to be spontaneous and fluent. “Noting” something on a Kindle feels like e-mailing yourself a throwaway remark. There’s also something attractive about the contrast between the impersonal authority of the printed page and the idiosyncrasies of the reader’s handwriting. A book someone has written in is an oddly intimate object; like an item of clothing once worn by a person now passed away, it retains something of its former owner’s presence.

No doubt this partly explains why there was such widespread interest in the contents of David Foster Wallace’s archive when it was acquired by the Ransom Center, in 2010. There’s something deeply gratifying, after all, about seeing how one of the most important writers of his generation modified Cormac McCarthy’s author photo, in a copy of “Suttree,” with spectacles, mustache, and fangs. It’s not as though Wallace never clowned around in his actual writing, of course, but this particular kind of goofiness—spontaneous, distracted, childish—makes him seem especially vivid and present. It’s probably not quite what Steiner had in mind with his definition of the intellectual, but it gives us a glimpse of a Wallace we wouldn’t otherwise have had access to. And, at time of writing, Amazon has still not introduced a “deface author photo” option to the Kindle’s menu bar.

The inside cover from David Foster Wallace’s teaching copy of Thomas Harris’s “The Silence of the Lambs.” Image courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center.