Erik Schmitt’s obsession with marginalia–handwritten scribbles or notes in the margins of books–began after he inherited a chunk of his grandfather’s library. Handwritten in the white spaces of the ...

Unlikely as it may sound, the study of such annotations is a recognized academic specialty, albeit an arcane one. There’s even a word for them, “marginalia,” coined by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge ...

To the many reasons we have for admiring Marlene Dietrich can now be added the fact that she was an inveterate scribbler in books. In a volume describing the love affair between Laurence Olivier and ...

We all know medieval marginalia is full of some pretty sick snail fights. No one knows why, exactly, but there are hundreds of old drawings of snails in combat with knights in old manuscripts. The ...

I recently bought a history of 19th-century France from a reputable second-hand books site, where its condition was described as “very good”. When it arrived, I was dismayed to find it scrawled all ...

At Steven Wolf Fine Arts, "The Marginalia Archive" by Washington, D.C., artist Molly Springfield extends her practice of drawing printed and handwritten text, and adds a social dimension. Some time ...

Even the most ardent defender of old book smell has to admit that digitizing the vast and essentially unending stream of texts, both old and new, is a valuable use of technology. E-readers aren't anti ...