Here’s what I think about writing in books:
1. Don’t do it to library books. Scribbling in pencil is no better than doing it in ink.
2. Writing on your own books is one privilege of buying them with your own money, so why not?
But if I happened across this, I probably wouldn’t mind so much…
It’s possible to treat books with too much reverence. I know of someone who treats books so carefully she doesn’t even like to crack the spine of a paperback. But for me, reading with a pen in my hand is a surefire way to absorb more of what I’ve read, and this is the main reason why I bought my own copies of the very expensive university texts rather than make use of the ones on short-term loan in the library.
I especially like books with nice, wide margins and double line spacing. This kind of book design is almost asking to be filled.
This is a book I go back to frequently, and I find it just as interesting to see what I chose to make a note of a few years ago:
marginalia in How Fiction Works by James Wood
According to Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, the best way to retain what you’ve read is to take notes on the material itself, then after you’ve read a chapter, write down a summary of what you’ve just read. If the book isn’t broken into chapters, write a one page summary after ten pages. (That’s a tip from Daniel Coyle.)
- summarised at Farnam Street blog: How To Retain More Of What You Read
Apart from the advantage of better retention, an annotated book means that no other book quite like yours exists in the entire world, regardless of its print-run.
See Also:
To Note or Not to Note: How Marginalia Changed the Way I Read from Book Riot
Medieval monks bitched a lot on the margins of books they wrote.
I’ve been listening to the audiobook of The Google Story this week, by Vise and Malseed, in which the Google Books project is described. My own experience of university libraries is of reading books full of underlining, scribbles and tiny Chinese characters squished between the lines. Yet I haven’t seen much of that when I do a Google book search. I wonder if my own university library was particularly bad for marginalia compared to the likes of Harvard and Oxford. Is marginalia similar to a wall of graffiti, or a toilet door, in which a little encourages more, leading to an entire library culture of marginalia?
See Best of the Art of Google Books from Flavorwire
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Someone at The Millions argues a case for David Foster Wallace’s footnotes probably getting him laid. I wouldn’t know. I’m not attempting David Foster Wallace until I’ve read a Dostoevsky. I do know that I find it annoying when I keep having to look at footnotes, then re-finding my position in the main text, when the footnotes really should’ve been a part of the main text in the first place.
