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Opinion

Scribbling in the Margins

MADISON, N.J. — THE graduate student thrust the library book toward me as though brandishing a sword. “This has got to stop,” she said. “It isn’t fair. How can I work on my dissertation with this mess?” As she marched out of my office, leaving the disfigured volume behind, her words stung — for the code of civility on which libraries depend had been violated. She was the third Ph.D. student in less than a year to bring me a similarly damaged volume, and each had expected me as the library director to turn sleuth, solve the mystery, and end the vandalism.

Someone had been defacing modern books containing translations of 16th-century texts. With garish strokes, the perpetrator had crossed out lines, then written alternate text in the margins. It did not take a Sherlock Holmes to observe that it was the work of a single hand, a hand wielding a fountain pen spewing green ink. The colorful alterations were not limited to a few pages but crept like a mold, page after page.

Some months later, in a faculty meeting, I noticed that the colleague sitting next to me was taking notes with a fountain pen. And the ink was telltale green. He was a professor of history, specializing in the Reformation and the Renaissance periods. The mystery appeared to be solved — he was undoubtedly the guilty scribbler. I asked him to visit my office.

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When I showed him the defaced volumes, he said, “Yes, that’s my work.” His prideful tone took me aback. I reminded him that he could not mark up books that belonged to the whole campus and had to cease and desist, but he countered that the books were really his since they were in his area of study, and that he needed to correct translations he disagreed with or could improve. I disabused him of his sense of entitlement and insisted that he stop marring the books — or lose his borrowing privileges. He left in a pique. A semester elapsed before he spoke to me again. But the flow of green ink stopped.

While we abhor seeing pages compromised in library books — stirring memories of elementary school days when, on the last day before summer vacation, our teachers kept us captive until we had erased all marks from our textbooks with the remaining stubs of our pink erasers — many of us write in our own books. What is reprehensible in one context can be beneficial in another.

Recently, Monticello scholars working in the libraries of Washington University in St. Louis discovered 74 volumes that were originally part of Thomas Jefferson’s personal library. It turns out that Jefferson wrote in his books. “Our discovery provides an amazing and intimate look into Jefferson’s world,” said Leslie Greene Bowman, president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. “To find his handwritten notations is like peering over Jefferson’s shoulder to see his mind at work.”

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Some of my university’s special collections include the personal libraries of important scholars who wrote in their books. Marginalia reveal much about their engagement with the text and the development of their ideas. Researchers and biographers mine those annotations. Such is the case with Will Herberg and Carl Michalson, scholars of religion who personalized their books with, respectively, blue fountain pen ink and a pencil. While browsing in these collections, the theologian Schubert M. Ogden observed to me that both men had owned Paul Tillich’s three-volume “Systematic Theology.”

“Too many theologians and philosophers who say they have read Tillich rarely ventured beyond the first volume,” he said. “Let’s take a look.” Herberg’s first volume of the set was heavily marked, but the other two were as new; Michalson had marked all three.

Books with well-marked pages associated with a well-known person are ringing up fancy auction prices. Last June a first edition of “The Great Gatsby” sold for $112,500 at Sotheby’s. It had been owned by the critic and author Malcolm Cowley, who played a significant role in the rise of Fitzgerald’s fame. Cowley had consulted Fitzgerald’s personal annotated copy of the novel at the Princeton University Library and copied over 100 of Fitzgerald’s notes into his own copy of the novel. Without the annotations, its hammer price would have been at least 30 percent less, said Richard Austin, head of Sotheby’s books and manuscripts department.

The habits of contemporary authors vary a great deal when it comes to pen-and-ink commentary as they read. The poet Maxine Kumin never writes in her books. Neither does Karen Armstrong, the scholar of religion, or Jonathan Rose, a scholar of Churchill and Orwell. But many do. “We have all seized the white perimeter as our own,” writes Billy Collins in his poem “Marginalia.” David S. Reynolds, a historian and critic, marks up his books, especially paperbacks. He calls it “talking back” to the book. The biographer T. J. Stiles never marks when reading for pleasure, but when reading for research it’s a different story. Then “highlighting and marginalia function like enzymes, breaking the book down to supply nutrition for my work.”

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Other authors have given up the practice. “I fervently annotated books until I started rereading the books I’d annotated,” Louise Erdrich has said. “My annotations were so absurd that I had to add another layer of annotations. By the time I started reading those books a third time, I was so irritated by my reading self that I got rid of the books and bought new ones.”

The world of digital books knows the importance of personal marginalia. Most of the major tablets and e-readers feature an annotation function. But the process is still cumbersome. The comment is tucked away, represented by an icon in the margin. The day of seeing the full note in the location of its birth, not to mention in the script of your own hand, is still an innovation or two away.

I write in my books. Not in special editions or volumes of great beauty, of course, but in the books that I read closely, fiction or nonfiction. Some of my notes are shrines of memory, as important as any cairn, honoring the place where life-changing events took place or where an author’s words took my breath away.

My hefty, two-volume college text, “Major British Writers,” is battered and worn, but I wouldn’t part with it. It documents my first encounter with Coleridge and the rotting sea of his “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Tiny red phrases streak the shore of the pages, conjuring up the voice of Prof. Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, whose riveting exegesis ensured that I would be making frequent pilgrimages back to those pages.

The wrathful God of my fundamentalist youth died in a chapter of Gordon Kaufman’s “Systematic Theology: A Historicist Perspective,” and I festooned the spot. Clustered around a single paragraph in Annie Proulx’s story collection “Fine Just the Way It Is” are notes and squiggles of amazement at how an adventure, stalled on an Idaho trail high above the timberline, could close with such haunting grace.

The jottings we make in the books we own may well be among the highest tributes we pay to authors. They are signs of respect, signs of engagement. What more could a writer hope for?

The dean of libraries at Drew University.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section SR, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline: Scribbling in the Margins. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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