ENDPAPER
Marginalia
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
NETRA SHYAM
THERE are really only two kinds of readers — those who write in books, and those who don't. I myself have never been able to scribble in the margins but several of my friends never begin a book without a soft pencil in hand. Coleridge, a compulsive book scribbler, called it marginalia. Lamb would lend books to Coleridge, and they would come back with annotations as long as the text. In one book he wrote: "I will not be long here, Charles! You will not mind my having spoiled a book in order to leave a Relic". And for Lamb this "tripled the value".
Sense of camaraderie
Readers writing in books usually takes the form of notes in the side margins of a book, though there are those who will scribble on the flyleaf or fill up the endpapers. (It occurs to very few readers that that's what the endpaper is there for). Marginalia varies from casual scribbles like "how true!" to lengthy arguments and discursive notes. Most browsers in used bookstores like the idea of finding a book with marginalia in it, it increases the value of the book for them. In 84 Charring Cross Road, Helene Hanff writes, "I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages some one long gone has called my attention to".
The reader-annotated book feels like a scruffy thing to some book lovers who can't stand the sight of yellow highlighters in books. But for the "marginalist" or "marginalian", making these margin-jottings is a form of conversation, turning monologue into dialogue. "When I revisit a book," says Cheriyan Alexander, a professor of English Literature and a bibliophile in Bangalore, "which I have previously marked, perhaps a decade or more ago, it always reminds me of Ariadne's thread. Ariadne is this character in Greek myth who accompanies Theseus on his dangerous expedition to the heart of the labyrinth to kill the dreaded Minotaur. In order to make it easy for them to find their way out through the maze, Ariadne unrolls a ball of woollen thread all the way from the entrance. After Theseus kills the monster, it is Ariadne's thread that makes it possible for them to navigate the maze. The markings in a book, the remarks scribbled in the margin, all help one traverse the labyrinthine recesses of a richly textured, highly nuanced tome." On the other hand, Rosamma Thomas, a book editor and bibliophile in Delhi, says, "A printed page with text neatly laid out and smart margins — how does one bring oneself to mark the sides, to mar such perfection? Especially if the book isn't your own, but borrowed from a library? One good old friend stoutly disagrees, and merrily marks up pages: generations of people may read after us, and we are doing them all a good turn when we mark things intelligently, underlining and commenting on the sides. The good parts of the book just spring out at you. Her motto: `Feel no qualms about ruining books — they perish like all things else; while they last, keep the conversations, the asides, going'."
Bookmarks to the past
Many marginalists use non-verbal codes — private signs and symbols recognised only by them. When she is not making graceful, nearly invisible soft pencil jottings, illustrator Netra Shyam uses minuscule post-it notes along the margins, to keep or remove at will. When she was 18, Ann Fadiman wrote in her paperback copy of Middlemarch such marginal advice to the heroine as "Don't marry that creep Casaubon". This may not be of value to anyone else, she notes in her book Ex Libris, but reminds her of the kind of person she once was. A marvellous fictional example of marginalia turns up in Bronte's Wuthering Heights, when Lockwood, unable to sleep, examines a few of Catherine's musty, old books and discovers: "... scarcely one chapter had escaped a pen-and-ink commentary... covering every morsel of blank the printer had left".
Thoughts on the wayside
The poet Billy Collins has a marvellous poem titled, happily enough, "Marginalia". "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," goes the poem.
"Even Irish monks", observes the poem, "in their cold scriptoria jotted along the borders of the Gospels brief asides about the pains of copying, a bird signing near their window, or the sunlight that illuminated their page-anonymous men catching a ride into the future on a vessel more lasting than themselves. And you have not read Joshua Reynolds, they say, until you have read him enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling."
It is the last verse, though, that moves me much and sums up best what it means to come across marginalia in a book:
Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil —
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet —
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."
pradeepsebastian@hotmail.com
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