Chapter Seventy-Eight, in which Marginalia is examined

One wonders if we really need to know this opinion of a former reader. Jennifer seemed to find the comment rather amusing.

On the other hand, Maud offers a quote from the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 201, which finds good reason for the practice of scribbling in books, at least when the scribbler is Graham Green.

[H]e wrote in the margins of his books ideas and images that sometimes became creatively transformed into short stories or novels–Dennys and McNeil estimate that in the books that comprised his collection at the time of his death there were "25,000 to 30,000 marginal linings."

So marginalia can be either a sin or a sacred scripture. Stefanie highly recommends Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, by H.J. Jackson. The publisher says this is the first book to explore the history of marginalia.

Your Bibliothecary has a personal history of marginalia, as probably do most readers. In our halcyon days we enjoyed few cares, and often jotted notes or underlined passages in books. Soon we decided the practice was acceptable, but we ought to erase behind ourself. When that came to mean too much profits for the eraser companies, we began to mark lines of text at the side of the page just enough to catch our eye later, when we would transcribe the line relevant to our noted thoughts. Later, to erase anything proved bothersome, so we turned to little colored strips of adhesive paper. Unfortunately, as years passed, our thoughts became more than our memory could handle, and strips of paper that once marked a sentence or phrase of much import, now marked only a blank question. What is a reader to do?

Behold, the Dri Mark® Book Saver removable ink pen. This pen features a specially formulated blue ink and a neutralizing wand tip that removes the ink completely, allowing one to write notes in the margins of any book or periodical, and wipe away the evidence when one is done. Skeptical? Well, we were, too, so off to the Mad About Books Research Laboratory we went.

We wrote in the margins of two books. The first was a 1936 hardcover dictionary with rather thin and yellowed leaves. The second was a 2003 trade book with arctic white leaves. We let our notes sit overnight, and then returned to mark them out. With a few quick rubs the ink disappeared. In its place appeared a dampish spot. This spot, however, went away in both books, and there is nary a trace left behind. Upon very close scrutiny, the older book shows the slightest blemish, but the new book looks remarkably new. We must declare that the magic pen worked as advertised.

There remains, of course, the manual labor of having to go back and "magically" erase one's notes. Maybe some things are intriguing to leave as written, a way to open up a fractured dialogue with another reader. Slanderous epithets should probably be marked out with the Book Saver pen. We pose this question then: what methods do others use to take notes during reading? And does marginalia found in a book bother you? Is the practice acceptable or despicable? Would you use even the Book Saver pen on the Gutenberg Bible?

Perhaps the best method to deal with marginalia, albeit in a slightly longer time span, is one employed by the Cambridge University Library. They stash the besmirched book away where, untouched and unaffected by environment, it maintains its otherwise pristine state until it becomes rare and valuable, at which time they find profit in restoring its originally unblemished margins.