Marginal Behavior: Book Graffiti
July 20th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
In “Marginal,” featured in the June 28 issue of The New Yorker, Author Ian Frazier gives his take on the New York Public Library event that focused on marginalia, aka those notes and sketches in the body, cover, and margins of books, what NYPL’s Anne Garner calls “book graffiti.” Of course, we’re not talking about just any marginalia. Selected from the library’s collection were books featuring the scribbles of literary giants like Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac, William Coleridge, and Vladimir Nabokov, to name a few.
From here
For designers, marginalia is best equated with one of our favorite ideas– the palimpsest – the layering of thoughts, intersections, and outside references informing and reforming the text in question. This is why ebooks for all their convenience are lost on me. Sure, a digital book is great for a beach read I never plan on picking up again, but for those texts that are important to me, a digital highlighter will never replace the physical act of underlining an well-constructed sentence or noting a particularly convincing passage. (Sue Halpern writes about the digital marginalia problem in “What the iPad Can’t Do” on the New York Review of Books blog.)
Image from the New York Review of Books
The most serious marginalians I’ve known in my life were philosophers. My philosophy mentor, a certain Mr. Casey, having read everything on the planet at least half a dozen times, created a key with dates on the inside front cover for his marginalia, i.e. black ink for the first read, blue for the second, pencil the third, double underlines on the fourth, and so on.
As an interpretive device, marginalia inspires a certain kind of faith. When returning to a text weeks, months, or years later, I always glance at my highlights and notes to get a feel for prior readings of the material. I’m no longer surprised when my marginalia seems to be written by someone else – someone better read in some instances, more naïve in others, or enamored with an idea for a reason inconceivable to me today.
Do you have a prime example of marginalia in your library? Scan and send it in. Perhaps an online exhibition is in order.
