What I Learned From Marginalized Snails About Mutiny
|
Marginalia isn’t mess—it’s meaning. From medieval monks to modern margins, here’s why annotating your books might make you a better writer. Welcome to What I Learned From… “When your heart speaks, take good notes.” — Judith Campbell What I Learned From …Margins are made for mutiny. If a book doesn’t have dog ears, highlights, and the occasional “WTF” scrawled in the corner, did you even read it? Somewhere in history, people got the idea that books should be preserved like sacred relics. Kept pristine…like they were meant to be displayed, not devoured. But for centuries, readers have done the opposite. They’ve scribbled, questioned, doodled, responded. Not to destroy the book, but to talk to it. They use these interactions to think through their own understanding of the text. It makes the experience their own. I do it, too. These days, I mostly read nonfiction on an eReader so I can download my notes and highlights later, but I still keep index cards tucked in pages, tab chapters with sticky flags, scribble ideas in the margins like a peculiarly literate squirrel stashing quotes like acorns. (Blame my 7th grade debate teacher, I guess her attribution drills stuck.) I’ve never been able to read passively. If I’m going to absorb something, I have to interact with it. Sometime I’ll tell you about my Word Journal… Because this urge to note and interact with our books is not new. Throughout history, some of our sharpest minds have marked their books relentlessly. Edgar Allan Poe even had a column called Marginalia in the 1840s, collecting fragmentary thoughts and celebrating the joy of conversing with literature in its margins. C.S. Lewis described making maps, genealogies, running headlines, and indexes in his books as what he called his 'funny little reading-hobby.' Plath, Twain, DFW, even Voltaire and Newton left the imprint of their mind in ink and graphite. These marks (called marginalia) aren’t just notes. This tradition goes back much further than the age of the paperback. In early Greek and Latin texts, explanatory notes called scholia were added to help interpret or expand on the content. In the Middle Ages, up to 50% of a manuscript page was intentionally left blank to allow space for readers' notes. Not all marginalia looks like thoughtful commentary, though. Some of it is absurd, chaotic, and hilarious. In medieval manuscripts, you’ll find doodles of rabbits jousting with snails, knights battling snails (the medieval equivalent of a viral meme), centaurs, warrior women, and cats waging war on mice. These illustrations, often lumped under the term "grotesques", weren’t always random decoration. Sometimes they satirized the text, or reflected daily life, or offered moral guidance in cartoon form. Sometimes they were gloriously random, filling space with pretty pictures for the sheer joy of it. Books were expensive, handwritten on vellum, often worth as much as a house. They were passed down through generations, and marginalia showed how knowledge had grown, shifted, or been challenged over time. These annotations were considered part of a book’s legacy, helping future readers follow the thread of ideas. You didn’t just read a book…you contributed to it. But this collaborative spirit faced a backlash. King Henry VIII imposed punishments for writing in royal books. Victorian librarians bleached out Milton’s marginalia. As mass production and lending libraries spread, margins shrank. The reasons are fairly classist: If you had money to buy and display lots of untouched books, and not have to share them, you kept them perfect to show off as a status symbol – a library of trophies, not tools. Clean copies became the norm and this collector mindset took over; preserve the object, even if it meant losing the conversation and meaning. But the scribblers never fully stopped. Marginalia persisted in private libraries and textbooks, like hidden rebellions. Students still hunt for heavily annotated copies at used bookstores, cause a prior student’s insights might make the class that much easier. Scholars comb through centuries-old manuscripts not just for the text, but for what was left in the margins. When we write in books, we’re not damaging them. We’re participating in them. We’re saying: This mattered to me. And for writers, this kind of reading becomes a training ground. You start by marking what stands out. Then you imitate it. Next, you try to understand why. Then, over time, you spin your learning into thoughts and writings of your own. That’s the same rhythm Become a Master Writer follows (almost like I know what I’m talking about here!) It’s built on the idea that reading with a pen in hand is how we sharpen our instincts, not just as readers, but as creators. Annotate, imitate, originate. It’s all right there in the margins. So yes, I mark my books. Not all of them of course. My vintage Dickens from my mom remains untouched. But paperbacks? Fair game. Because when you really love something, it gets a little worn and a little messy. Just like the Velveteen Rabbit, a book becomes real only when it’s been loved enough that its fur gets rubbed off. And once it’s real, as the Skin Horse says, “you can’t become unreal again.” Marginalia is that beautiful process of loving your book so much it comes alive and becomes real. Previously in This Writing Life …All the good stuff you were meant to see but probably didn’t.
Worth Reading …The pieces that made me pause last week
Notes from the Masters …Craft advice that holds up, straight from the ones who lived it. “Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it? First, it keeps you awake — not merely conscious, but wide awake. Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks. Third, writing your reactions down helps you to remember the thoughts of the author. Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author. Presumably he knows more about the subject than you do; if not, you probably should not be bothering with his book. But understanding is a two-way operation; the learner has to question himself and question the teacher, once he understands what the teacher is saying. Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.” — Mortimer Adler & Charles van Doren, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading Prompted: Your Move …A spark from this week’s essay. Use it to write your own. Choose one of your old essays or journal entries. Re-read it and write your marginalia as a second voice…the “you” who’s reading it now. Let those margin notes become the seed for a new essay about how your understanding has evolved. Glossary of The Forgotten …Because life’s too chaotic for bland words. Grangerize [GREYN-juhr-ahyz] (v.) — To illustrate a book with extra material (e.g. maps, prints, annotations, clippings) often repurposed from other books. A personalized remix of the original. From James Granger, whose 1769 Biographical History of England left blank pages for this very purpose, sparking a craze of book augmentation. To grangerize is to believe a book is not an end point, but a conversation starter. Sorta synonyms: annotate, black-out [poetry], scrapbook Use it for: building a personal archive inside another’s work, honoring the text by rearranging its bones, the ultimate act of bibliophilic love (or vandalism) Want to read more in-depth Glossary entries? Catch up on the archives and find this week’s newest one. Try This Thing …No promises. Just a potentially brilliant shortcut or two. Novel November: Looking to get a(nother) book knocked out this November? ProWritingAid has revived the process with an author-studded 30-day writing sprint that offers progress tracking, community features, milestone celebrations, and more…all for free! The Final Chuckle …Serious writing deserves unserious endings. Tale as old as time. ‘Til next time ~ Elisa |