Jackson, H.J. (2001) Marginalia: Readers Writing In Books. 1st ed. Harrisonburg, Virginia: R. R. Donnelley & Sons.

• Someone has written on the dedication page, in pencil, "BORING BOOK - WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH ALL THAT REGURGITATION OF ACCOUNTS"

Quotes

• "How do we explain the discrepancy between worthless notes and priceless ones?" - pg. 2, Introduction.
• "If you ask annotators today what systems they use for marking their books and where they learned them, they generally tell you that their methods are private and idiosyncratic." - pg. 5, Introduction.
• "In more ways than one, marginalia mirror the texts they supplement." - pg. 41, Physical features.
• "Indeed the custom may be as old as script itself, for readers have to interpret writing, and note follows text as thunder follows lightning." - pg. 44, History.
• "The eighteenth century was the golden age of the letter too." - pg. 61, History.
• "Lovers will seize on whatever means of communication are available to them, and books with marginalia often turn out to be a record of affection." - pg. 72, History.
• "Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) seems to have started off as a writer of marginalia by writing in books to amuse his fiancée." - pg. 72, History.
• "If books are to be shared even with intimate friends, readers will be on their guard, putting on - however unconsciously - a kind of performance." - pg. 74, History.
• "Annotators are self-conscious readers" - pg. 81, Motives for marginalia.
• "Writing marginalia is not so much akin to conversation or collaboration or correspondence as it is to talking back to the TV set - and readers like it that way." - pg. 85, Motives for marginalia.
• "It is a confident and creative critic who can write, as Brooke did of Saintsbury's contribution to the fifth volume of the Cambridge History of English Literature, 'Professor Saintsbury's chapters among the rest stand out like a hippopotamus in an expanse of mud, clumsy and and absurd, but alive.'" - pg. 121, Object lessons.
• "For White, writing marginalia was definitely a form of therapy." - pg. 147, Object lessons.
• "He also supplements the information that Herodotus provides with further facts and later histories - extensive notes about desert winds, for instance, and about the Renaissance in Italy." - pg. 180, Books for fanatics.
• "They are not perfectly transparent, they do not give us direct access to the complex motions of the reader's mind, but they do provide glimpses and from the glimpses we may begin to build up a reasonably reliable reconstruction of the process itself. In computer-speak, we could say that marginalia reveal the codes." - pg. 257, Book use or book abuse.

Words, phrases

• casuistry: study of right and wrong
• annotators
• commonplace experience
• childhood
• documentary evidence - albums and autographs
• flyleaf
• "Hic Nomen pono | Quia Librum perdere nolo" - "I put this name down because I do not wish to lose the book" - pg. 25, Physical features.
• torrent of invective
• the genteel vogue for botanizing that began in the eighteenth century
• scholia, scholium
• choleric
• blunders
• written with force and taste
• A. Urquhart
• Not wishing to break a butterfly on a wheel or take a chainsaw to a birthday cake, I have to protest, all the same, that a book without text is a book without marginalia.
• "the dead whom we are shouting at"
• "This book's English is the rottenest that was ever puked upon paper" - pg. 91.
• " Not only was Wordsworth seen to cut open a book with a buttery knife" - pg. 95.
• "Circumstances change." - pg. 97.
• Thraliana
• stuff about Hester Thrale
• waspish
• remorselessly thorough
• [ba dum ba dum ba dum]
• trochaic verse
• "The chosen word of the poet is first of all the word which will recall the most vivid image to the imaginary impressions of the senses."
• cramming classics
• prosody
• Ezra Pound
• precocious
• old folios
• mercurial
• delightfully erratic
• "the Victorian love of trivial particulars" - pg. 195.
• "These rigid brittle intellectual splinters?" - pg. 209.
• "Hullo!"
• affections mingling
• creative symbiosis
• "thick lachrymose lines"

Annotations

• [Everything is important, relatively, subjectively, socially. Fucking everything and nothing.] - pg. 4, Introduction.
• "childish pencil scrawls at the end" [my fave] - pg. 5, Introduction.
• "intrinsic merit" [?] - pg. 8, Introduction.
• "Interleaving is a practical constraint of margins." [but is there something fun/encouraging about that constraint?] - pg. 36, Physical features.
• "The original and literal meaning of "profile" is the outline of something - a human face, a landform a building." [etymology of "profile" - link to social networking profiles] - pg. 149, Two profiles.

Silly annotations

• "he tossed off" [did he?] - pg. 38, Physical features.
• "doodlesome" [everything I do is doodlesome] - pg. 40, Physical features.
• "In a burst of exuberant merriment she suddenly fell overboard." [this happens to me all the time!] - pg. 141, Object lessons.
• "The porter had become a bottlemad brute." [that's what I am] - pg. 172, Two profiles.
• "the prince of annotators." [No, that's me.] - pg. 204, Poetics.
• "Fanny Blood" [cool name] - pg. 218, Poetics.
• [sexy sexy Keats]
• [Learn about bugs.]