Used Books

"The subject of this book is marginalia – what readers write in the margin and how readers underline and annotate books. Sherman describes a big historical shift. We tend to see writing in books as an act of defacement. For example, if you return your library copy of Sherman’s book with passages that have been highlighted you will receive a hefty fine. But readers in the Renaissance thought that if you didn’t leave notes in the margin of a book then you were being lazy and passive, because you weren’t doing the job of engaging with the text and answering back to it. Sherman showed that until two or three hundred years ago, children were taught how to write in books. There were very conventional systems of how you were supposed to take notes in the margins. At the same time, until wood pulp was used in paper making in the 19th century paper was a very expensive commodity, and because people didn’t have scrap paper lying about, books became a useful source of raw material. So you find books with shopping lists written in the front, or spaces where people practised their handwriting. In fact, if you look at copies of children’s books from before about 1800 you don’t usually find annotations in the margin about the content of the book. Instead you see things like a child’s name written over and over, because they are practising their signature. Or in a few touching cases you find a girl’s first name with a different last name, and it is clear she is thinking about what her married name will be because there is a boy she likes. But this is also one of the frustrating things for scholars who work on the history of reading, because we often hope that by looking at which passages are underlined, or comments in the margins of old books, we will gain a greater insight into how those first readers of some important literary work responded to it. In reality their marginalia is often completely unrelated to the content of the book. Today, on the other hand, you can see which passages are most often highlighted by Kindle users by simply going to the Amazon website, and if they archive this data they will make life much easier for future historians."