Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books

From Pierre de Fermat to Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Graham Greene, readers have related to books through the notes they write in the margins. In this pioneering book—the first to examine the phenomenon of marginalia—H.J. Jackson surveys an extraordinary range of annotated books to explore the history of marginalia, the forms they take, the psychology that underlies them, and the reactions they provoke.

Based on a study of thousands of books annotated by readers both famous and obscure over t...