Marginalia and Other Small Rebellions

Somewhere in my twenties I stopped believing that a book was a museum object, and started believing it was a conversation I was allowed to interrupt. This took longer than it should have. I had been trained, the way most careful children are, to keep books clean (spine uncracked, pages unmarked, corners unturned), as though the highest compliment you could pay a piece of writing was to leave no trace of having read it. I have come to think this is backward. A pristine book has often not been read so much as passed through.

Marginalia is the record of a mind changing its opinion in real time, and it takes a few different forms depending on what the reader is actually doing:

• Agreement, usually a single underline or a small “yes” in the margin, deployed far too generously in the first chapter of any book you already wanted to like
• Argument, which shows up as a question mark, a “no,” or, in the margins of one stubborn essay collection I own, the phrase “citation needed” written three separate times
• Cross-reference, connecting page 40 to page 212 with an arrow and a note, because the author has just contradicted something they said two hundred pages earlier and you are the only witness
• Confession, the rarest kind, where the note is not about the book at all but about you: “read this the week M. left,” scrawled in a hand that is not quite as steady as the rest

None of these categories are mutually exclusive, and the best-annotated books I own move between all four within a single page, sometimes in the same sentence, first agreeing, then arguing, then confessing.

There is an old objection to all of this, usually delivered by someone eyeing your pencil with faint alarm: that marking a book damages it, or disrespects the author, or (my favorite) that it will make the book harder to sell later. I no longer find any of these persuasive. A book is not a stock certificate. Its resale value is the least interesting thing about it. And an author who wanted total silence from readers would not have bothered writing something worth arguing with.

A marginal note, done honestly, is proof that a book met a mind and both of them came out slightly altered.

— from a letter, author unknown, quoted without permission from my own notebook

What marginalia gives you, over years, is something closer to a second book: the one you actually read, as opposed to the one that was printed. Pull an old paperback off the shelf and the notes in the margin will often tell you more about who you were at twenty-three than the text itself does. The underlines cluster in different places than they would today. The arguments you picked with the author are ones you might now concede, or press even harder. This second book keeps changing even after the first one is finished, which is more than can be said for most conversations you have actually had out loud.

So: write in your books. Underline badly, in pen, without a ruler. Argue in the margin with writers who have been dead for a century and cannot possibly respond. It is one of the few genuinely private forms of reading left, and it is available to anyone with a pencil and the nerve to use it.