Why Should You Write in the Margins?

My grandmother's copy of The Odyssey.

Source: Nancy K. Napier

With so much talk about loneliness, with causes ranging from the pandemic to social media, I've been reading and thinking about it more. It's also striking me hard as I try to learn how to write fiction (sitting alone in the mountains, listening to the rain on a cloudy morning).

Then, the solution came to me. Marginalia—writing notes in the margins of books.

I'm not sure if it's writers' porn, but the notion of writing in and on hard copy books as one reads them has been around for ages, but I never considered the range of uses it offers.

Remembering Your Earlier Self

Ted Gioia of The Honest Broker describes the ways he takes notes about books or lectures he reads and hears. Rereading his notes brings him back to that lecture hall or when he reads something. He can remember his high school thoughts when he reads his comments.

Of course, items we cherish do the same: A rock picked up on a beach in North Carolina, a shell from Denmark, or a letter opener from a long-gone relative. It's like holding pieces of history and memories spring from them. So, too, with rereading notes left in a book years ago.

Notes in The Illiad.

Source: Nancy K. Napier

Socializing in the Margins

I understood the notion of writing notes and marginalia for myself. I didn't realize, though, that it was a form of socializing.

Long ago, in 2011, Sam Anderson wrote about how people in the 1700s wrote notes in books and gave them as gifts. Lovers scribbled and passed books to one another. It was a form of socializing, aside from letters. What a wonderful thought and a way to combat loneliness.

Interestingly, even the Wall Street Journal has weighed in. A July article by a millennial questions why her baby boomer parents prefer Kindles over hard-copy books. Her generation, she claims, loves the feel of books, the ability to write in them, and the idea of passing them on to others. It could be an action of friendship or a way to connect through the ages. How could her great-great-grandchild understand her ancestor if all she had was a Paperwhite rather than a marked-up dog-eared copy of Little Women?

When I scanned my grandmother's editions of Homer's poems, my imagination played with that idea.

An English major, my grandmother graduated from college in the early 1920s. I have her 1921 edition of Palmer's The Odyssey of Homer and a 1915 edition of The Illiad of Homer, "Done into English prose by Andrew Lang, M.A. Walter Leaf, Litt.D., and Ernest Myers, M.A." She scribbled furiously, making notes about passages that were "vivid" or showed a "ceremonial detail."

The notes are in pen and pencil, so I wonder if she reread the pieces or if she read and passed them on to someone else who made notes. Perhaps she was reading a used version with an earlier student's notes. I don't know, but I loved thinking that perhaps she shared notes with someone as a way to socialize.

Marginalia as a Precursor to Writing

Austin Kleon's newsletter often talks about "reading with a pencil." Yes, make notes in the margins about what speaks to you, what angers you, and where you would like to punch the author (he talks about that, too). He goes on to say that reading should lead to marginalia, which should lead to writing. Without careful and active reading, we'll never be good writers. And in my personal pursuit to learn how to write fiction, this makes good sense. Read, scribble, write.

I'm on it.