I read a charming article in The Washington Post about a strange new trend. It seems that myriad bloggers and vloggers have a penchant for “annotation” of books, i.e., underlining favorite passages, scrawling in the margins, and flagging pages with stickie notes and paper clips.
My eyes were round as saucers as I read the article. I do not write in books. I do not underline with colored pens. I do not comment in the margins. And I never buy a used book with even light marginalia.
You cannot sell a used book with marginalia, either. In graduate school, my husband and I sold our books to eke out our tiny stipends. We learned that a clean book is worth more than a book scrawled with notes. A cockroach once crawled out of one of my husband’s books: Johannes, the shop owner, gave him a withering look. Johannes rejected one of my books on the basis of coffee stains. As for notes in books, Johannes disapproved of anything beyond one’s name written on an endpage, and that he clearly thought unnecessary.
Johannes taught us that books are important objects in their own right. I never saw a single book in that shop with writing in it.
It’s not that I’m against annotation, though I call it marginalia. But I prefer to take notes in a notebook. I write the page number beside my notes.
Step away from the highlighter, ma’am!
It used to be said dedicated book-collectors needed three copies of a book – one to read, one to display and one to lend. Perhaps they also need one to annotate too.
The poet and critic William Empson was an enthusiastic annotator (when he wasn’t using kippers’ spines as bookmarks). It’s said the London Library used to make him pay a deposit equal to the replacement value of a book before he borrowed it. On the other hand, a friend who found a battered scrawled-on copy of one of
Empson’s books realised the scrawls were Empson’s own second thoughts and resold it at profit, so annotations sometimes are worth having.
Meanwhile, I’m looking for Elizabethan copies of North’s Plutarch and Florio’s Montaigne. If they’re annotated in the right hand…
I’m not a collector, but I do enjoy the idea of having three copies of each book. And why not four, even if I do not annotate it?
Johannes would have banned Empson from the shop! But I do want to read Empson now, so thank you. His annotation would have been more interesting than mine. That’s for sure!
P.S. What do you recommend by Empson? He does sound fascinating in the Wikipedia article, and I had never heard of him.
The Collected Poems, obviously. The Penguin edition has about three times as much space for notes as for poems, but they’re great fun to read, even (or especially) without the poems. Seven Types of Ambiguity made Empson famous, if that’s the word for a critic, and Milton’s God is a quarrel with – well – Milton’s god. One of Empson’s books is called Argufying, approipriately.
Thanks. I will look for his poetry. I do love Milton, so the essay sounds good, too..
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