Marginalia

In this week’s episode, we’re talking about, at least in part, book jackets, originally meant to keep books safe in their journey between book binder and book reader. Of course, the books on my shelf often have dust jackets, but in the more modern sense - the little flaps of folded paper, emblazoned with the author’s name and the book title and the cover image and blurbs and author photo and biography and the publisher’s name and all the rest. They may still go some way to protecting the books on my shelf, but they are nowhere near as defensive as the original brown paper wrappings of old. Instead, I am the defender of my books, guarding them carefully from destruction and ruin.

I do not mean that my books are under attack from invaders, swinging swords and buckling swash. I mean that I am one of those fussy, uptight people who likes to keep a book in the best condition I can, and for me that means no writing on the pages, no dog-earing the corners, fastidious use of bookmarks, and nothing more than a careful cup of tea while I read - no greasy fingers leaving stains on the paper, no smudges of dirt and dinner. I hate to hear the crack of a new book’s spine, and nothing gives me so much shame as the circular stains on a childhood favourite who had a nasty run-in with a leaking lunchbag. I have some second-hand paperbacks with crumbling, tattered front covers, softened with age, and I handle those poor dears with extra care and delicacy. My high school copy of Romeo and Juliet was in such bad shape that I made a new cover for it, hoping against hope to protect its curling pages from more damage, and, to my relief, the new binding has lasted reasonably well. The most I will admit to doing is putting my name on their frontispiece, and this is more for the books than for me - since childhood, it seemed important to me that my books know they are beloved, that they belong to someone who treasures them. If I were a book, I think I would take comfort in a pencilled name on my inner cover as a point of pride, like being named after an adored family member. Any books that might be reading this are very welcome to weigh in on the matter.

But there is a flaw in this caution, in the preservation of books taken to this level. As a reader, I delight in a pristine book, but as a historian, the very best documents are the ones covered in someone’s scrawl. Second-hand books that have little notes in them are adored - they are like little messengers, linking two strangers with those smudged notes and asides in the margins. I love an old frontispiece with a bookplate bearing the name of the previous owner, and an inscription from the giver (and, as I think we can all agree, books are among the best gifts). I once spent an exciting afternoon in Library Archives poring over correspondence between an artist and a gallery, and the typed part of each letter was polite, restrained, cordial. But the responding notes each writer had scribbled told quite a different story - one of frustration, contempt, dogged stubbornness, and some choice language. If those snarly letter-writers had stuck strictly to their typewriters, I would never have uncovered their real feelings, the dramatic complexities simmering under the surface of their words. Perhaps I am doing future historians a disservice by not writing charming, witty asides in the margin of my beloved books.

These personal, revealing little notes are nothing new, by the way. People have been scrawling things alongside the main body of their texts for centuries - there’s even a word for it: marginalia. Some of our earliest examples, which stretch all the way back to the earliest illuminated manuscripts, feature little notes and drawings, some quite silly, paired with serious religious tracts, the Gospels, and Books of Hours. There are little animals jousting, tiny knights tilting at giant snails, fantastical beasts, grinning skulls, little doodles, and rarely, little cat pawprints from when some ancient monk’s cat stepped in the ink. Scholars have dedicated their careers to studying marginalia. So perhaps I am quite wrong-headed in endeavouring to keep my books perfect, untouched. I cannot promise that I’m going to paint miniatures in the margins of my pages suddenly - that feels like quite a leap, and it would give me heart palpitations. But perhaps the very lightest of pencil marks…alas, no, dear reader. If I am honest, that still feels like too much. Instead, I might borrow another practice from those ancient monks: florilegia, the practice of keeping a little notebook or journal of quotations and scraps of text from one’s favourites, paired with reflections and thoughts, to be read together to create a new text, to spark new meaning and as a devotional practice. If future historians find my florilegium, I hope it brings them the same delight I feel when I encounter a message from a past reader. Or perhaps they’ll find some disintegrating copy of this blog, and then who knows what they’ll think, dear reader?

Jennifer