Margin of Error

One of the chief pleasures of owning used books is inspecting their margins for the scribblings of the previous owner. Snide jokes, charming irrelevancies, cheers of approval and disapproval—all of these little things bring a kind of vicarious joy to the second-hand book connoisseur. But the best commentaries are the really, really stupid ones.

The prior owner of my copy of The Prince, for example, thought it necessary to repeatedly point out a certain “Machiavellian” quality he was picking up on in the text. Someone else used the margins of James Joyce’s Dubliners to observe how “very Irish” it all was. And a reader of my German history textbook circled every single word in a wholly unimportant paragraph, and then wrote “Hitler was a man” in the margin.

Whenever I stumble upon one of these gems, I’m reminded of that Billy Collins poem, “Marginalia,” describing the selfsame phenomenon: “One scrawls ‘Metaphor’ next to a stanza of Eliot’s. / Another notes the presence of ‘Irony’ / Fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.”

The commonest argument I’ve heard on behalf of these inanities is that they help people to assure themselves they have, in fact, done the reading. As such, we should not hold them to any higher standard than absentminded doodling. The poet Collins ultimately comes to a similar conclusion: “We have all seized the white perimeter as our own / and reached for a pen if only to show / we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages; / we pressed a thought into the wayside, / planted an impression along the verge.”

Personally, I take a less indulgent view. Whenever I write notes of my own, I try to imagine they are for posterity, or at least for the future owner of my book.

All of you Harvard students who privately harbor fantasies that you’ll be famous one day would be well advised to join me in keeping a hypothetical rapt public in mind when you put pen to (the edge of the) paper. Because future historians will doubtlessly mine the margins of your old books for clues about your character.

Mao Zedong, for instance, would likely roll over in his grave to learn of the publication, in a recent biography, of this rambling and rather mushy scrap of marginalia from his days as an idealistic student: “Since I cannot forget the feeling I have toward the one I love, my will desires to save her and I will do everything possible to save her…I would rather die myself than let her die.” Sweet, but also embarrassing if you’re supposed to be the iron-fisted dictator of Communist China.

All of this attention to the judgments of others will probably seem like an exercise in vanity to some. Margin notes, they will say, are not intended for other people. And those who think otherwise are just engaged in an exhibitionist charade all the more pathetic because no one, probably, will ever read those notes, potential future biographers notwithstanding.

But the fear of being judged can serve nobler purposes. It sharpens the wit. It forces active engagement with the text. It prevents sloppy thinking. It builds character.

It’s the reason our classes make us write papers. The mere specter of a skeptical reader forces us to translate our inchoate thoughts into clear, convincing language. Margin notes, for those who live in fear of posterity’s judgments, are just papers writ small.

There is nothing neurotic about this fear. It is one of the many self-disciplining mechanisms that make us more presentable to the rest of the world. I would go so far as to call it healthy, social behavior.

Rather than treating book margins as the receptacles of their unthinking drivel, note-takers should embrace the chastising influence of an absent reader. Those with substantial egos can imagine that reader as a future biographer, while the modest can simply picture a judgmental type like myself, who will publish your stupidities in the student newspaper for all to read.



Charlie E. Riggs ’10, a Crimson editorial editor, is a history concentrator in Quincy House.