MARGINALIA*

Sometime in the ninth century, in a monastery scriptorium in the Alpine reaches of the Carolingian empire, an Irish monk copying a Latin grammar looked up from his labour and wrote a poem in the margin. It was not about God, and it was not about grammar. It was about his cat.^**“Pangur Bán” survives in a ninth-century manuscript kept at St. Paul’s Abbey in Carinthia, copied by a monk trained in the Irish tradition. The translation quoted is Robin Flower’s, which every Irish schoolchild once knew by heart. I and Pangur Bán, my cat, ’tis a like task we are at: hunting mice is his delight, hunting words I sit all night. The poem was never meant for us. It was meant for the margin – that strip of expensive vellum left blank around the text, where the official work of the page ended and something unofficial, human, and almost always more interesting began.

This is the open secret of books: they have always been written twice. Once by their authors, in ink meant to last a thousand years; and again by their readers, in a scrawl meant for no one at all. The second text rarely survives its owner. When it does, it is often worth more than the first. The margin was never empty space waiting to be trimmed. It was the reader’s half of the page.

The habit is older than the codex. The scholars of Alexandria crowded the edges of their Homer with scholia – variant readings, quarrels, small fits of pedantry that are now, in many cases, all that remains of entire lost libraries. Medieval schoolmasters made the practice a technology. A difficult Latin word got its explanation written between the lines; a difficult idea got its explanation written beside them. The explanation was called a gloss,^††From the Greek glōssa, “tongue” – originally a word so obscure it needed explaining, and only later the explanation itself. The term migrated from the problem to the solution. and by the twelfth century the glosses had staged a quiet coup. The standard Bible of the medieval university arrived with its margins pre-filled: a few lines of scripture marooned at the centre of the page, ringed on every side by centuries of commentary.^‡‡The Glossa Ordinaria. On its densest pages the sacred text shrinks to an island of a dozen words in a sea of annotation – the layout every threaded comment section has been unknowingly imitating since. The margin, in other words, is the original comment thread. We did not invent writing in the presence of other people’s writing. We inherited it.

And not all of it was scholarship. Readers drew little pointing hands against passages they loved – the manicule, the most common mark left in books for six hundred years.^§§From the Latin manicula, “little hand.” Some readers gave theirs lace cuffs; some, when they felt strongly enough, gave theirs six fingers. Scribes complained in the margins about thin ink, bad vellum, and cold hands. They cursed future book thieves with inventive damnations. They doodled dogs, knights, and snails. The margins of the Middle Ages amount to a shadow literature – unsigned, unpaid, and very often the only place on the page where anyone tells the truth.

Around 1637, a provincial French magistrate named Pierre de Fermat was reading his copy of Diophantus when he saw something. In the margin beside Problem Ⅱ.8 he wrote that he had found a truly marvellous proof, which this margin is too narrow to contain.^‖‖“Cuius rei demonstrationem mirabilem sane detexi. Hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet.” The book itself is lost; we have the note only because it was printed. Then he died without writing the proof anywhere else. His son Samuel, going through his father’s books, published a new edition of the Diophantus with the marginal notes set into the text – the margin, for once, becoming the book. Mathematics spent the next three and a half centuries chasing that one sentence, until Andrew Wiles finally ran it down in a proof that no margin ever bound could hold.^¶¶Announced in 1993, repaired by 1995, and published across 129 pages of the Annals of Mathematics – a demonstration, at last, of exactly how narrow the margin had been.

“The most consequential mathematical claim of the modern era was, in publishing terms, a doodle.”

The Romantics turned the habit into an art form and gave it its name. The word marginalia – a Latin plural smuggled into English – first appeared in print in 1819, over the initials of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,^##In Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Coleridge’s collected marginal notes now fill six fat volumes of the Bollingen edition – a major work he never knew he was writing. who annotated other people’s books so brilliantly that friends lent him theirs on purpose and counted the defacement a profit. Charles Lamb claimed a borrowed book came back from Coleridge with its value tripled. William Blake went the other way and used the margin as a dueling ground: his copy of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s polite Discourses is scorched with rebuttals – “This Man was Hired to Depress Art.” And in the summer of 1849 a New York novelist bought a secondhand set of Shakespeare and began underlining. The pencil marks thicken around Lear’s madness and Macbeth’s murderers; scholars have traced the wake of that pencil, almost line by line, into the making of Moby-Dick.^☙☙Melville’s annotated Milton surfaced at auction in 1983 and set off a small scholarly gold rush. Ahab was drafted, at least in part, in someone else’s margins.

Then came the shame. Mass printing made books cheap; public libraries made them communal; and marginalia was reclassified, in the space of two generations, from conversation to vandalism. The clean page became a moral achievement, enforced by rubber stamps and schoolteachers. It took a philosopher to mount the defence. Writing in a book, Mortimer Adler argued in 1940, is not an act of defacement but the highest compliment a reader can pay^∴∴“How to Mark a Book,” The Saturday Review of Literature, July 1940. “Full ownership comes only when you have made it a part of yourself.” – the difference between owning a book and merely storing one.

“A book that has been written in is a book that has been answered.”

The margin, of course, has since come back – it simply moved. The e-reader shows you the faint dotted underline of ten thousand strangers; whole websites exist to lay a public margin over song lyrics, over news, over the web itself. Something real is gained: the medieval page, crowded with many hands, is alive again. But something has changed in the ink. The old marginalia were letters to no one – private, unperformed, written in the sincere belief that nobody would ever read them. That is precisely why we trust them. Nobody underlines to impress a margin.

Which is why the best argument for writing in books is the experience of buying a used one. You find a stranger’s pencil in chapter three – a bracket, a manicule, one incredulous exclamation mark – and the room becomes quietly crowded. Someone was here before you, hunting the same words. The monk at his grammar had it right all along. The work is the text; the life is in the margin. Hunting words, we sit all night – and the page, if we are honest with it, hunts back.