in progress.

There are those aphorisms which are entertained by people with such regularity that their truths are often assumed to be absolute; for instance, the well-known expressions that an old dog cannot be taught a new trick, that a single bird in one’s possession should be valued above multiple fowl in a bush, and that the buoyancy of cream will assure its rise to the top, by displacement of the crap beneath it. But perhaps the most troublesome of all idioms is the one that instructs a person that there is no value to be gained in judging a book by its cover—a thinking person will certainly know that quite the contrary is often the case: there is, In fact, much to be learned by looking at things such as a book’s overall condition, its marginal notes, and the objects its readers have left inside of it.

Those who write in the margins make a sort of contribution to the text. It is clear that whatever one contributes in this way is limited. It is added not to an edition, but to a single copy. In view of its limited readership, one may ask what the point is to all this. Of course over time ancient marginal notes have been known to enter into later copies of a text. This was especially true before the advent to mass printing. Sometimes these additions are blended so completely that they appear to have been part of the original text itself. It is then left to later readers to uncover them as elements of addition. For example, when Erasmus consulted the oldest of the then existing sources, he came to the understanding that the phrase, “father, son, and holy ghost,” was not in the original text of the Book of John. That is, its presence in that book antedated the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon, where early Christians hammered out the Trinitarian model out in an attempt to reconcile their belief in Christ’s divinity and their belief in monotheism. This was, by the way, an issue over which early Christians slaughtered and persecuted each other in droves before arriving at a consensus. There are of course other examples of influential marginalia, but its lasting value is perhaps its exclusivity.

In this way I write to a person who will not respond and who may now be long dead. This is a one-way correspondence that I maintain with the man who wrote these original side comments, some 43 years ago. Perhaps in some years’ time another person will come along and answer mine. But what does all this scribbling add to a book? These layers of thought, over time, are imbued with their own tone and take on something like their own life: one intimate reader communicates with another: two people who for a time loved the same book (the very same) reach out to each other over the years, the centuries and share an insightful comment or rude pun. I for one find this incredibly charming. Such is the beauty of marginalia, an art which is now all but lost, though its spirit may live on in the form of internet message boards, as well as in the prose of the public restroom wall.

But as revealing as marginalia is, it may be that the objects that one leaves in a book can perhaps be just as interesting. What people leave to mark their places in a book can vary from church flyers and newspaper clippings to bills and doctors’ orders.