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Is it just me or has there been an increase in people wanting to study marginalia lately? I didn't get many questions about it much before but for the past two years there has been a steady flow of people documenting readers comments.
Do you get used books if they have comments in them? Or do you like clean copies? I've found it both fascinating and infuriating. When i was a student i'd go so far as to argue with the previous owner of a particular book.
Now I think i'd have a heart-attack if I saw someone wander toward my books with a pen.
Wishing I could read Latin,
iris
Do you get used books if they have comments in them? Or do you like clean copies? I've found it both fascinating and infuriating. When i was a student i'd go so far as to argue with the previous owner of a particular book.
Now I think i'd have a heart-attack if I saw someone wander toward my books with a pen.
Wishing I could read Latin,
iris
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Re: Study of Marginalia
04/06Personally, I find marginalia very interesting - sort of adds to the piece, expanding it. Marginalia can expand the cultural context of a book (or any piece of wriring for that matter). In a way, marginalia is something of a precursor to hypertext (along with other annotations, footnotes, endnotes, etc.) I once thought about writing a thesis paper on marginalia.
When it comes to interpreting literature (of any stripe, not just poetry, plays, stories), everything is fair game. One reader might have a different perspective on things and can point a different reader in a new direction that might not have been available to the second if there was no additions. -
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Re: Study of Marginalia
04/09I think you've probably hit the motive behind most students of marginalia right on the head. This one bloke recently was very specific about his author and wanted to see how he, the author, was received, not just in his own country, but in all the other countries that cared to translate the work. As someone whose aim would be anthropological or sociological it is a wonderful topic. Very difficult to gather examples though.
The greatest story of marginalia I ever heard was from a professor of Medieval Irish literature. They could gage how long a script for ogham was in use by the marginalia in religious latin texts scribed by Irish monks. At that point the marginalia was not commentary as much as it was small personal messages between scribes.
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