Marginalia From a Borrowed Copy

Last spring I borrowed a secondhand copy of a book I thought I knew well. It came from a friend who had picked it up at a sale, and it arrived with a stranger's pencil all over it. I confess I was annoyed for roughly a page and a half. Then I became absorbed, and for two weeks I read two books at once: the printed one, and the one in the margins.

The first impression

Marginalia is intimate in an odd way. You're reading over someone's shoulder, years after the fact, with no way of asking them what they meant. The notes begin cautiously. A small tick. A line beneath a phrase. Then, around the fourth chapter, the stranger loses patience and writes, in a firm, rather elegant hand, "Surely not?"

I laughed aloud. I had the same objection, in the same place, and had never written it down. I felt, absurdly, that I'd been understood.

What the notes were doing

I started to sort them. There were, I think, four kinds.

• Agreement. The simple ticks and exclamation marks, a reader saying yes.

• Doubt. Question marks, "why?", the occasional "check this".

• Translation. Short paraphrases beside hard sentences, as if the reader were explaining the book to a younger self.

• Private asides. The strangest and best: a shopping reminder, a name, "ring Tom", a small drawing of a bird.

It was the last group that moved me most. Those notes weren't about the book at all. They were evidence that the book had been read in a life, in a kitchen or a train carriage, among interruptions. Each aside was a little window onto an ordinary day, left open by accident.

A disagreement, conducted by pencil

Towards the end the stranger and I began to quarrel. They had underlined a passage as the key to the whole argument; I thought it a flourish. They wrote "essential" beside it. I wanted to write "decorative" next to their "essential" and then felt, rather suddenly, that I could not. The book wasn't mine. The conversation had a prior claim.

So I did what I tell my students never to do and left the book untouched. I copied my reply into a notebook instead, where it still sits, a rebuttal addressed to someone who will never read it.

What I took from it

A printed page seems finished and a marked one feels alive. It is the same text, but the second has been answered, and an answered text is a different kind of object. It shows that reading is not receiving; it is a reply.

I give the book back this week. I haven't erased anything, and I won't. A scholar's duty to a borrowed volume is to return it unharmed, and the stranger's pencil is part of its condition now. If you ever lend me a book, I should warn you that I'll read the margins before the text, and that I may be a little in love with whoever wrote them.