Unlikely as it may sound, the study of such annotations is a recognized academic specialty, albeit an arcane one. There’s even a word for them, “marginalia,” coined by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge ...

Marginalia is having a moment. While many people consider it sacrilege to write — whether with pencil or pen — in the blank spots on the pages of a print book, there are also those who celebrate the ...

Erik Schmitt’s obsession with marginalia–handwritten scribbles or notes in the margins of books–began after he inherited a chunk of his grandfather’s library. Handwritten in the white spaces of the ...

“In getting my books,” Edgar Allan Poe wrote in 1844, “I have always been solicitous of an ample margin; this is not so much through any love of the thing in itself, however agreeable, as for the ...

I recently bought a history of 19th-century France from a reputable second-hand books site, where its condition was described as “very good”. When it arrived, I was dismayed to find it scrawled all ...

To the many reasons we have for admiring Marlene Dietrich can now be added the fact that she was an inveterate scribbler in books. In a volume describing the love affair between Laurence Olivier and ...

Before there were television and movie screens to talk back to, people vented, pontificated and waxed poetic in the margins of their books, leaving heaps of material for Jackson, an English professor ...

Readers are sharing how they write their predictions into novels, colour-code their emotional responses and even gift annotated books to friends. Is it actually fun, or just a bit like homework? There ...