Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books

It's difficult to imagine a scholarly enterprise easier to mock than a study of marginalia, the marks left behind by readers making their way through a text. Few readers pause to consider, let alone scrutinize, these bookish graffiti. Still, it is hard not to feel an affectionate regard for Jackson, a professor of English at the University of Toronto, laboring through hundreds of marked-up copies of Boswell's Life of Johnson and earnestly proposing a poetics of marginalia, with its own ethics and standards of practice and its own fusty acronyms (e.g., BEPU, or ""Book Enhanced for Personal Use""). She brings to life, insofar as it is possible, the war between marginalia's practitioners and prohibitionists, the ""annotators"" vs. the ""bibliophiles"" (""anarchists,"" as Jackson neatly puts it, vs. ""bores""): Wordsworth, for example, enraged his friend De Quincey by cutting open the pages of a new book with a butter-smeared knife. It's fair to say this book is most absorbing in its examples, such as the famous case of Fermat's last theorem (Fermat declared the margin of his book too small to contain the proof, leaving generations of mathematicians to wish they had been on hand with a Post-It). (Mar.) Forecast: Though rather dry, this unique title holds obvious appeal for bibliophiles, book historians, librarians, publishing folk and garden-variety obsessives. The key to its success will be targeted marketing in book-related magazines and handselling by booksellers, the latter a likely proposition.