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 ...

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 ...

This is not the way we feel about the anonymous scribblers who, in defiance of repeated injunctions and severe but unenforceable penalties, insert their observations in the margins of library books. I ...

Readers on TikTok and Instagram are making the aesthetics of reading more visible than ever with creative, and often intricate, annotations. Called marginalia, these markups can be elaborate, with ...

We all know medieval marginalia is full of some pretty sick snail fights. No one knows why, exactly, but there are hundreds of old drawings of snails in combat with knights in old manuscripts. The ...

We can trace a direct line of descent from Coleridge’s marginalia to the social-media annotators who painstakingly embellish a copy of a friend’s favourite novel as a gift. But the ancestry of those ...