Mingling With The Text

It seems that the business of marking or highlighting notable passages in the books we read has suddenly become a hot topic on the Web. No sooner had I written a blog about it earlier in the week, then Sam Anderson took up the issue in an article, “What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text,” in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.

The onslaught of e-readers and tablets is surely one of the reasons the matter has taken center stage, as scribbling on these gadgets is virtually impossible. And those who are dedicated, almost addicted to the practice, are facing a serious quandary. Anderson says that when he first read about the “spiritual and intellectual” benefits of marking up books, his life was changed forever. Here’s how he puts it:

I quickly adopted the habit of marginalia: underling memorable lines, writing keywords in blank spaces, jotting important page numbers inside of back covers…. Soon my little habit progressed into a full-on dependency. My markings grew more elaborate…I basically destroyed my favorite books…with scribbled insight.

He says he rarely reads anything these days without a pen or pencil in hand. Marking up these documents “is the closest I come to regular meditation.”

And get this: “…marginalia is—no exaggeration—possibly the most pleasurable thing I do on a daily basis.”

Well! Get the word out!

Anderson then moves on to a lengthy discussion of what he calls the “grand vision of social reading,” a topic that interests me less than the matter of taking seriously getting involved in a book by marking it up. Anderson imagines,

“…a stack of transparent, margin-size plastic strips containing all of my notes from Infinite Jest. These I thought could be passed out to my friends, who would paste them into their own copies of the book and then, in turn, give me their marginalia strips, which I would paste into my copy, and we’d all have a big virtual orgy of never-ending literary communion.”

Anderson also dreams of more than reading the marginalia of your friends and other readers, for example, those who share their notes on Kindle, but also, “the notes from all of history’s most interesting book markers.” Good grief! If you’re really interested in all those readers, I can’t imagine reading more than one book a year.

Do I want to read the marginalia of other people? (“I’ll show you my scribbles if you show me yours?”) Anderson reports his wife really gets annoyed when she reads a book he has already read. And I can’t imagine getting much pleasure from reading the marginalia of others especially while I’m reading a book for the first time. Maybe I might after I finish it, say to compare notes for a while. But I can easily live without that.

Once I compared the marks in the margin I made in Night Train to Lisbon with those of another reader friend of mine. I must have marked over 100 separate passages, while she marked less than 10 and there wasn’t a single overlapping passage between us. The probability of that outcome must be about .0000002 given all the passages I had marked.

Anderson makes no mention of the last but to me crucial step of transcribing the marked passages in a notebook or as I do, in a Word document. This is one way to “reread,” the book, consider once again the passages that mean the most to you, and have a permanent record to recall and perhaps draw upon in writing about the book.

Anderson, like all of us, hopes that there soon be a time when those who write the software for these digital readers will take the practice of writing in the margins seriously. I cannot imagine it is that difficult a technical problem given everything else these gizmos can do.

Dots in the Margin

I’ve never read or heard about someone who reads quite the way I do. Mostly I see readers, without pen or pencil, simply flipping from one page to next, whether it is in a printed or electronic book. However, Nicholson Baker appears to come close to my practice. He describes his routine in an essay, “Narrow Road” in the Autumn 2000 issue of the American Scholar.

“When I come across something I really like in a book, I put a little dot in the margin. Not a check, not a double line—these would be pedantic—but a single, nearly invisible tap or nudge of the pen-tip that could almost be a dark flick in the paper.”

He says he doesn’t like to make too many dots—no more than ten or fifteen in any book. I have no idea why.

He also prefers dots to any other marking procedure because it is less obtrusive, less distracting to others if they read his copy of the book or to him if he rereads it again.

But there is more: “I also write the numbers of the marked pages in the back. Then—and this is the most important part—at some later date, sometimes years later, I refer to the page numbers, locate the dots, and copy in a spiral-bound notebook the passages that have awaited my return.”

I follow the same procedure but instead of copying by hand (totally unreadable and almost impossible to search), I copy the saved passages into a Word document making them far more legible and retrievable.

And unlike Baker, I do this when I finish the book or periodical. Baker started to fall behind about fifteen years ago and he still hasn’t caught up. “I have dozens, probably hundreds of books with a column of page numbers written on the endpapers whose appealing sentences or paragraphs I have not yet transcribed.”

The only other instance of someone I know about who follows my method, at least partially, is David Cecil, an English 20th Century writer and literary scholar. In Library Looking Glass, he describes his procedure this way.

“…when anything in the text has especially struck me, I have noted on the end-paper the number of the page where this has occurred. Sometimes my note simply indicated admiration…The passage referred to was beautiful or comical or well-written in ways that had a peculiar appeal to my own taste, or it stated a view which I found especially illuminating; or it stimulated in me a fruitful train of thought.”

Cecil is silent on his copying procedure, but he wrote and read well before the digital age. My hunch is that he kept a notebook of his collected passages but I can’t be sure of that. Instead, he may have simply checked the page numbers listed at the back of the book when he wanted to review his saved passages.

In his introduction to the Oxford World’s Classic edition of The Major Works of Francis Bacon, Brian Vickers writes about the notebook culture of Bacon’s time.

“All educationalists taught that reading was to be carried out pen in hand, ready to note in the margin metaphors, similes, exempla, sententiae, apophthegms, proverbs, or any other transportable units of literary composition. These were then to be copied out into one or more notebooks, divided either alphabetically or by topics, and to be reused in one’s own writing.”

During the Renaissance, the highpoint of the commonplace book tradition, writing by hand in a notebook was about the only way you could preserve one’s reading preferences. And I suspect that is also true almost everyone who keep a commonplace book today.

I know people differ on the relative merits of typing or writing by hand. However, in my case, there really isn’t any other way, if I want to look back to read and retrieve what I’ve found most memorable in a book I’ve read. Or, indeed, if I want to find out if I have already read the book.

On Marginalia

In this week’s Monday Times there was an article headlined, “Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margins.” At once I shifted into high gear and read it with deep concentration, roused from the Net-induced fragmented thinking that has swept over me lately.

The article written by Dirk Johnson bemoans the end of the fine art of scribbling marks in the margin that he believes electronic readers are bound to lead to. The concern he describes is almost exclusively among literary scholars who will be at a loss once they are no longer able to glean the insights revealed by the notes writers have made in the books read they’ve read. How they do this has always been a mystery to me

It is almost uniformly believed that e-readers will put an end to this practice to the extent that notable writers read with these gadgets. However, according to G. Thomas Tansville, “People will always find a way to annotate electronically. But there is the question of how it is going to be preserved.”

The article cites the work of Heather Jackson who has written several books on the significance of the marginalia found in books. She believes these margin notes have considerable historical meaning and reveal “a pattern of emotional reactions among everyday readers that might otherwise be missed, even by literary professionals.” I confess, I have read Jackson’s books and have yet to be persuaded.

But it seems to me the issue extends well beyond the preservation of marginalia for scholarly research. The issue concerns the very nature of reading itself and the degree to which a reader becomes engaged with the text. It is clearly expressed by Studs Terkel, the oral historian, who is quoted in the Times article as admonishing “a friend who would read his books but leave them free of markings. He told them that reading a book should not be a passive exercise, but rather a raucous conversation.”

Most engaged readers read slowly as they stop to consider a sentence or an idea and sometimes put a note in the margin or highlight a passage to indicate this. And some of them will collect these passages and preserve them in what has traditionally come to be known as a commonplace book.

Not many contemporary readers do this. But it wasn’t so long ago that it was the norm, when readers wrote on the pages of the text what they thought about it and collected their reflections in a notebook. They might have read in a more disjointed fashion, skipping from one book to another to let their thoughts settle in or spend time annotating the material in order to make some sense of it.

This might have been the golden age of reading, the period that reached its peak during the Renaissance but is largely extinct now. What we have lost is not only the marginalia of celebrity readers but also the practice of engaged reading itself.

For some individuals the art of reading, as David Ulin, points out in his recent book The Lost Art of Reading is an “act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. We possess the books we read…but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves.”

It’s a matter of becoming involved in the text and thinking about it and while that is sometimes a time-consuming process, it is made a little easier by putting your thoughts down on the page so you can recapture them later. Reading a book may take days or weeks, but that is sometimes only the beginning of thinking about it. Collecting marginal notes in a commonplace book enables you to keep the reading experience alive and make the most of its lingering after effects.