I’m Iris Calloway. For eleven years I worked at Quarto & Vellum, a used bookstore on Wickenden Street in Providence, Rhode Island — first behind the register, then doing the buying, then doing more or less everything, the way it goes in a shop with three employees and one functioning space heater. The store closed in the spring of 2023, for the usual reasons, none of them interesting. This site opened a few months later, for reasons that are perhaps the same reasons.
The Marginal Note is a blog in the old sense: one person, writing when she has something to say, about the things she can’t stop thinking about. Mostly that means reading — the books themselves, but also the practice of reading, which seems to me more endangered and more interesting than any individual book. I write about attention, about libraries and bookstores, about paper and its stubborn refusal to die, about what technology does to the reading mind, and occasionally about a new book that won’t leave me alone.
The name comes from the habit that organized my working life: reading the notes people leave in the margins of used books. When you process a few hundred books a week, you become an accidental archivist of strangers’ thinking — their arguments with dead authors, their grocery lists, their grief. A marginal note is the smallest unit of literary criticism and the most honest one. I try to write essays that keep that spirit: notes made in the margin of other, better books.
Some things it may help to know:
— I publish irregularly. Essays appear when they’re done, which is sometimes twice a month and sometimes not for six weeks. The RSS feed and the subscribe box both exist so you don’t have to check back.
— Comments are open and I read all of them. The comment section here is small and unusually good, and I intend to keep it that way by answering people who take the time to write.
— I review books occasionally, only ones I’ve finished, and I buy every copy myself. No galleys, no affiliate links. If I loved a book you published, it’s because I loved it.
— Before the bookstore I did other things: two years of graduate school in comparative literature (unfinished, unregretted), a stint proofreading legal documents, one bad winter writing catalog copy for a furniture company. All of it turns out to have been training for this, in the way that everything turns out to have been training for whatever you end up doing.
I live on the East Side of Providence with an unreasonable number of books, a reasonable number of cats (one), and a spouse who has learned to ask “is that a library book?” before commenting on anything I’ve done to a margin.
You can write to me at iris@themarginalnote.com. I answer everything, eventually. Eventually can mean three weeks.