Why I Still Write in the Margins

There is a pencil in every coat I own. This is not a virtue; it is a symptom. Somewhere in my early twenties I stopped being able to read with my hands empty, and the habit has survived every subsequent change in my life — jobs, apartments, the arrival and departure of entire categories of ambition. The books on my shelves are annotated the way a well-used trail is blazed. I could no more read without a pencil than walk with my eyes closed.

I want to defend this habit, because it needs defending. Marginalia has a bad reputation among the tidy. It is defacement, they say; it is presumption. The book is a finished thing, and who are you, with your stub of a golf pencil, to interrupt? I have heard this argument made with real feeling by people I respect, people who keep their books so pristine that twenty years of reading has left no evidence on their shelves at all, as though the books had been merely stored rather than lived in.

But a book is not a finished thing. A book is half of a conversation, begun by someone who may be dead, waiting for the other half. The text does not change, but the reading of it is new every time, and the margin is where the reading becomes visible. When I write no — and I write no a great deal — I am not defacing the author’s argument. I am doing the author the courtesy of taking it seriously enough to resist. The books that leave my margins empty are the ones that failed to reach me at all. Silence, in my library, is the insult. The pencil is the compliment.

Eleven years of working in a used bookstore taught me that I am not alone in this, and taught me what the practice looks like from the outside, at one remove, when the marginalia arrives orphaned from its author. We processed hundreds of books a week, and some meaningful fraction carried writing in them: underlinings, arguments, checkmarks, the occasional phone number or shopping list pressed into service of a life the book briefly shared. My coworkers found it a nuisance — marked-up books sell for less — and it is true that I have priced-down more Penguin Classics than I care to remember on account of some undergraduate’s highlighter. But I never learned to see it as damage. It was evidence. Someone had been here. The trail was blazed.

The best marginalia I ever found was in a copy of The Varieties of Religious Experience, in a small, upright hand, in ink — a brave choice, ink; no takebacks. The notes started out academic, the usual apparatus of a serious reader: definitions, cross-references, a running index built on the back flyleaf. Somewhere around the lectures on conversion, the notes changed. They got personal. This is what happened to R. they said, and then, later, this is what did NOT happen to me, whatever I told everyone. By the final chapters the reader had stopped arguing with William James and started arguing with themselves, in the margin, in ink, in a book they must have known would outlive the argument. I sold that book for six dollars to a kid from RISD, and I think about it monthly.

What I learned from that book — from all the orphaned marginalia, but from that one especially — is that the margin is where reading becomes honest. The main text is public; the margin is private; and things get said in private that the public account never records. You can read a person’s marginalia and know them in a way their conversation would never permit. This is also why marginalia embarrasses us. My college copy of Middlemarch contains marginal notes of such staggering, sincere wrongness that I keep the book on a high shelf, the way you keep photographs of a haircut you once chose on purpose. But I would not erase them. That wrong reader was me; her notes are the only proof I have of what the book was like the first time, before rereading sanded the strangeness off it.

The pencil matters, I should say. Pencil is the correct instrument, and not because it erases — I never erase — but because of what it says about the writer’s posture. Ink asserts. Pencil proposes. A pencil note in a margin has the grammatical mood of a question even when it is shaped like a statement: this seems wrong? it says. Consider this? What if? The medium builds the humility in. And the graphite ages the way reading ages, softening, smudging, going silver at an angle to the light. An old pencil note is legible the way an old memory is legible: mostly, and with effort, and differently than intended.

I am aware that this entire essay is available in a more efficient version, in which I simply admit that I like to talk and books cannot stop me. Fine. But I would put it the other way. Reading is the strangest of the intimacies: hours inside another mind, with no way to answer back except this one. The margin is the reader’s only speaking part in a play otherwise written entirely by someone else. When people tell me they could never write in a book, what I hear is that they have accepted the role of audience. I have not. The margin is small, but it is mine, and I intend to keep talking.

A closing note for the horrified: I own these books. Library books are common ground and I keep my pencil away from them, mostly, with lapses I regret, and one lapse I do not — a single word, yes, left in a library copy of a poet I will not name, next to a stanza that deserved it. Whoever borrowed the book after me: I stand by it. You would have written it too.