The students had a good appreciation for their predecessors' distillation of knowledge. She discovered that in several university departments, students would scour the piles of textbooks at used book dealers for consistently annotated copies. Marshall, doing research on the future of user interface design, has studied the phenomenon of user annotation of texts. Marginalia can add to or detract from the value of an association copy of a book, depending on the author of the marginalia and on the book.Ĭatherine C. "Marginalia" by Edgar Allan Poe appeared in The Democratic Review, July 1846, published by Thomas Prentice Kettell. Voltaire composed in book margins while in prison, and Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a personal statement in margins just before his execution. Some famous marginalia were serious works, or drafts thereof, written in margins due to scarcity of paper. Beginning in the 1990s, attempts have been made to design and market e-book devices permitting a limited form of marginalia. Coleridge's marginalia have been published. From 1845 to 1849 Edgar Allan Poe titled some of his reflections and fragmentary material "Marginalia". The first recorded use of the word marginalia is in 1819 in Blackwood's Magazine. Voltaire, in the 1700s, annotated books in his library so extensively that his annotations have been collected and published. Marginalia did not become unusual until sometime in the 1800s.įermat's claim, written around 1637, of a proof of Fermat's last theorem too big to fit in the margin is the most famous mathematical marginal note. Hand annotations occur in most surviving books through the end of the 1500s. The first Gutenberg Bible was printed in the 1450s. Printed books gradually became much less expensive, so they were no longer regarded as long-term assets to be improved for succeeding generations. The practice of writing in the margins of books gradually declined over several centuries after the invention of the printing press. Of the 52 extant manuscript copies of Lucretius' "De rerum natura" (On the Nature of Things) available to scholars, all but three contain marginal notes. Readers commonly wrote notes in the margins of books in order to enhance the understanding of later readers. Books, therefore, were long-term investments expected to be handed down to succeeding generations. Paper was expensive and vellum was much more expensive. In Europe, before the invention of the printing press, books were copied by hand, originally onto vellum and later onto paper. The scholia on classical manuscripts are the earliest known form of marginalia. For this reason, scholars of ancient texts usually try to find as many still existing manuscripts of the texts they are researching, because the notes scribbled in the margin might contain additional clues to the interpretation of these texts. As such, they might give clues to an earlier, more widely known context of the extant form of the underlying text than is currently appreciated. Marginalia may also be of relevance because many ancient or medieval writers of marginalia may have had access to other relevant texts that, although they may have been widely copied at the time, have since then been lost due to wars, prosecution, or censorship. There are some scholia, corrections and other notes usually made later by hand in the margin. Numbers of texts' divisions are given at the margin ( κεφάλαια, Ammonian Sections, Eusebian Canons). They may be scribbles, comments, glosses (annotations), critiques, doodles, drolleries, or illuminations.īiblical manuscripts have notes in the margin, for liturgical use. Marginalia (or apostils) are marks made in the margins of a book or other document. A page from an illuminated Armenian manuscript with painted marginalia
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