Another scene describes her working around this time in her office in wealthy, sterile Belgravia, in a "high-backed chair" as in Downing Street, "looking at papers with the help of a huge magnifying glass … underlining, marking marginalia, gathering odds and ends together in files, and then forgetting where she had put them".
The volume addresses the material dimensions of the book in terms of the knowledge systems that informed them, looking not only to printed features such as title pages, tables, indexes and illustrations but also to the marginalia and other marks of use that actual readers and users left in and on their books.
Recent scholarship in the lively field of marginalia has treated readers' marks almost exclusively as a verbal phenomenon – as words, that is, next to other words.
After glancing at the copious marginalia and yellow highlights that mark my copy of Elizabeth Kryder-Reid's California Mission Landscapes, it is not hard to understand why she recently won the 2017 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize from the Foundation for Landscape Studies.
Headings, paragraph marks, punctuation and marginalia, in red.
Anne Garner's specialty is marginalia, and she had place-marked some of her favorites for Jennifer Lam, of the library's press office, and another visitor.
Mark Twain's marginalia shows him as a literary critic.
Now, when the Coleridge of 21st-century marginalia emerges, he should be able to mark up the books of a million friends at once.
You could even "subscribe" to your favorite critic's marginalia — get, say, one thoroughly marked-up digital book every month.
For ff. 1r-13r only: headings, paragraph marks, underlining of passages glossed in marginalia and running headlines, all in red; for ff.
But the inherent quality of the Beethoven marginalia, which also included small and faintly charming choral pieces made to mark a landlady's demise and a patron's son's birthday, was not really the issue.
