Volume 48, Number 19 · November 29, 2001
The Reader Strikes Back
By John Gross
Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books
by H.J. Jackson
Yale University Press, 324 pp., $27.95
It was Coleridge who launched the Latin word 'marginalia' on its English career. In his mid-thirties, around 1807, he began to be known for his habit of annotating books in elaborate detail. (He had been more abstemious when he was young.) Friends cherished his scribbled comments, and encouraged him to mark up copies of their own books; and in 1819, when he decided to publish some notes which he had jotted down many years before in a volume by Sir Thomas Browne, the as yet unfamiliar term Marginalia was the title he chose.
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