Eleven years of used books means eleven years of fieldwork, and it is time I published. What follows is a taxonomy of the notes strangers leave in books — collected at the rate of several specimens a week across a decade at the pricing table, classified by hand, presented here without the Latin binomials the subject deserves but with the respect it has earned. Every marked book that crossed my counter was two documents: the one printed, and the one a reader made of it. This guide concerns the second document.
The Underliner. The commonest species by an order of magnitude, and the most mysterious for it. The Underliner draws a line beneath a sentence and says nothing. What did the line mean? Agreement? Astonishment? Remember this? The line is pure gesture — a finger pointing, forever, at something, held by someone whose reasons died with the pointing. Subspecies are legion: the Ruler-Straight (a person of discipline; often also dog-ears, the hypocrite), the Wavering Ballpoint (read in bed; the line sags as sleep arrives, and you can watch consciousness leave the reader mid-sentence, which is as intimate as printed matter gets), and the dreaded Highlighter, fluorescent, unerasable, capable of reducing a Penguin Classic’s resale value by half — my ledger says so — while adding, I must grudgingly report, a perfect map of what one specific undergraduate feared would be on the exam.
The Arguer. My favorite genus, and the margins’ aristocracy. The Arguer talks back: No. Wrong. See p. 41 where he contradicts this. Oh, come ON. The Arguer treats the author as present, alive, and overdue for correction — a category error, technically, and also the highest compliment reading can pay, an attention so complete it forgets the author can’t hear. The finest Arguer in my collection worked through a smug book of political economy in 1970s fountain pen, was defeated on no page, and closed the campaign on the endpaper with a full summary judgment beginning “The author has mistaken his portfolio for a philosophy,” which is better criticism than the book ever received in print.
The Student. Instantly identifiable: definitions in the margin, themes flagged as THEME, symbols dutifully labeled as if tagging animals for later study. The Student’s notes are not really about the book; they are about surviving the book, and their pathos is their obedience — you can reconstruct the syllabus, sometimes the very lecture, from what got flagged. And yet. In nearly every Student copy there comes a page, somewhere past the assigned diligence, where the handwriting changes, loosens, and writes something unrequired. In a school copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God: forty pages of dutiful THEME, and then, beside Janie under the pear tree, in suddenly smaller script, this is what I mean when I try to explain it to M. The Student had stopped studying and started reading. That page is why I never priced a marked book without turning every leaf.
The Corrector — added to this taxonomy by field report, and instantly confirmed against my own specimens (a longtime reader of this site described the species after the first draft of this guide circulated: fixes typos, in pen, in books they do not own; has been observed correcting the grammar of fictional characters speaking dialogue). The Corrector’s marginalia is the only genus that aspires to invisibility: the dream is a text with nothing wrong in it. It is proofreading as a moral position. I once found stet written beside an em-dash. Somebody out there is having an argument with copyediting itself, across all books, on behalf of the universe.
The Grief-Stricken. I approach this genus carefully, because its specimens are not really marginalia; they are letters that chose a margin for privacy. They cluster in particular habitats — poetry, memoirs of illness, C. S. Lewis — and they address the dead directly. Beside a stanza: a date, and the year you left. On a flyleaf, beneath a printed dedication: reading it anyway. you were right about him. When these came across the counter I did not price them down, whatever the ledger wanted. Some books arrive at a store still warm, and you shelve them the way you’d carry something sleeping.
The Coder. Rarest of all: the private system. Symbols in the margin — dots, crosses, spirals — consistent across hundreds of pages, meaning something, meaning it precisely, and meaning it to exactly one person ever. I owned for years a copy of Montaigne annotated entirely in such a code: three distinct marks, distributed with evident logic, plus, on one page only, beside the essay on friendship, all three marks together, the only such conjunction in six hundred pages. I never cracked it. I never wanted to, quite. Somewhere in the code was a whole reader — a mind that had built a language for its own responses and trusted the book to keep it — and the unbroken cipher was the purest specimen my collection ever held: proof that reading is, first and last, a secret one keeps even when writing it down.
A guide should end with advice for the field, so: read the margins of everything used you buy. You are not snooping; you are the addressee of last resort. The Underliner’s finger points at you now; the Arguer needed a witness; the Student finally understood it, and someone should know. The second document has a readership of whoever comes next. Come next.
You missed one: the Corrector. Fixes typos in pen, in books they do not own, with the serene confidence of someone who has never been wrong. I found one who had corrected a character’s grammar in dialogue.