Why Write in the Margin? Because the Book Was Not Finished Yet

Manuscript books were produced with wide margins deliberately, because a text was understood as something to be worked with rather than merely read. Scholars added explanations of difficult words, cross references to other passages, corrections of errors they had spotted, translations, and their own arguments with the author. Teaching texts accumulated layers of such commentary over generations, and in some traditions the commentary became more important than the work it surrounded, with pages laid out so that a central block of original text is enclosed by several different commentators arranged in bands around it.

The range of surviving annotation is wide and much of it is not scholarly:

• •Explanations of hard words and unfamiliar references
• •Cross references to other passages and other books
• •Pointing hands drawn to mark an important line
• •Corrections, both of the text and of the previous annotator
• •Objections, insults and expressions of boredom
• •Household records, recipes, births and deaths, written wherever there was space

Copying manuscripts was cold, slow and physically punishing work, and the people doing it left notes about it in the margins of the books they were producing, which survive in considerable numbers. Recurring complaints include the cold, poor light, bad ink, a difficult exemplar, aching fingers and backs, and the length of the task, along with requests for wine, observations about the weather and prayers for it to end. One Irish scribe wrote about his cat. Those notes were not meant for readers and are among the most direct surviving voices from the period, which is why they are quoted so often.

Annotation is evidence about reading, which is otherwise almost impossible to recover. A book that has been marked shows which passages a particular reader thought mattered, what they already knew, what they had to look up, and where they disagreed, which is a record of a mind at work rather than of a text. Tracing the same reader across several surviving books reconstructs an intellectual life in detail. Marks also reveal how a text circulated, since identical annotations in different copies show a teaching context where a lecturer dictated them. And ownership inscriptions, prices and binder's notes track where a book went across centuries.

Printing did not end annotation and eventually the culture around books changed so that it did. Early printed books were frequently annotated as heavily as manuscripts, since readers continued to expect to work on a text, and surviving copies carry the notes of named owners whose reading can therefore be reconstructed. The shift came with cheaper books, with public and circulating libraries where writing in a shared copy is vandalism rather than contribution, and with an idea of the book as a finished object. Annotation survives in academic reading and is returning in digital form, where highlights and notes are stored separately and can be shared, which is close to the older practice by another route.

Wide margins were provided because a text was something to be worked on, and readers added explanations, cross references, corrections and arguments, with commentary sometimes arranged in bands around a small central text. Scribes complained about cold, light and aching hands in the margins of the books they copied. Cheap books and shared library copies turned the practice from contribution into vandalism.