On Writing in Books

David M. Levy

As someone who loves books and libraries, I’ve always been disturbed to discover that a previous borrower has written in a book I’ve just checked out. In a heavily marked up copy of Rollo May’s Man’s Search for Himself (item 59 in the collection, a later reader (himself a marginal commentator) writes: “I’d really like to meet the person who did all these underlinings and comments and see if he or she found what he was looking for.” (Would he really, or is he simply expressing his exasperation at the prior borrower’s abundance of distracting scribbles?)

When and why do we write in books—our own, as well as others? When is this acceptable and when not? What makes some annotations more successful than others, and who gets to judge? Here are some musings prompted by additional items in the collection.

Items 51 and 57: These two books, owned by former Harvard professors, show off a mode of note-taking that is workmanlike and practical—filled with literate commentary, underlinings and clear annotations that were probably quite useful to them for lecturing and scholarship. The markings seem unselfconscious, with little concern for any aesthetic effect they might impose on the page.

Item 15: Here again we see a book being annotated within an educational context, but this time undertaken more than three centuries earlier and by a student rather than an established scholar. The same forms of note-taking are present (interlinear translation plus marginal commentary), but here the page is densely filled, and at least to my eye, uncomfortably busy. Does this density matter, possibly making the annotations less readable?

Item 34: This modern book is just as densely marked, yet my eye is drawn toward it rather than away. Here the scene designer Edward Gordon Craig has added layers of drawing and writing to a promptbook for Macbeth, producing something that is visually rich and enticing.

Item 31: Finally, the last stop on this brief tour is my favorite. The title page of Shunsuke Tsurumi’s Japanese translation of a work of Kierkegaard’s is spare and beautiful. Here my ideal mode of annotation is realized: utility and beauty combined. Notice how red handwritten English follows the vertical lines of the Japanese text, harmonizing and contrasting with it. If only I could achieve this effect!