Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books
H.J. Jackson
Yale University Press, 2001

There's an interesting discussion going on here, there, everywhere in the blogosphere about what kind of literary genre the blog might be. A full-on academic conference will soon be held on the subject, based on the idea that "digital technology has created new genres of meaning making and human interaction."

This kind of breathless futurism — "where no man has gone before" — always makes me snort, although I like Digital Genres ' insistence on the point that "a cultural critic who writes about video games without playing them is as incongruous as an art historian who has never been inside a museum." I feel the same way about journalists who write about whether or not blogging is "real journalism" without engaging actively in establishing an active social network, even if they do post their own pearls of wisdom to a blog that's really nothing more than a self-promotional monologue — a "blogologue"?

Although H.J. Jackson, a professor of English at the University of Toronto, does not explicitly set out to write a history of blogging before the invention of electricity, much less the rise of digital communications, I want to suggest that in some ways, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books , is just that: A careful study of the modes of social-network formation by people who circulated and annotated published material, and annotated the annotations of others, over the past three centuries.

Jackson's survey of the subject is based on a careful empirical study in the archives of the English-speaking world, "the examination of more than two thousand annotated books in great public or academic libraries."

Her findings are fascinating. Among the topics discussed is the death of annotation with the rise of the public library, and with it, the stern commandment drilled into all of us from kindergarten: "Thou shalt not write in library books." Consider this development in light of the disputes between proprietary and open source software projects. Thou shalt, or thou shalt not, or thou may betimes, with certain conditions, alter ye source code.

Thomas de Quincey complains that Wordsworth, unlike Coleridge, abuses his books because he tears pages without using a knife, and, in the same catalogue of bad behavior, "rarely, indeed wrote on the margin of [them], and when he did, ... the comments were such as might have been made by anybody." Sounds like the reader forums at the Agonist.

The chapter on "Motives for Marginalia" poses the question, "why do people write in books? For whose benefit is it done?" A number of similarities can be found for the reasons people blog. In some cases, people were writing to themselves, recording their ongoing dialogue with the author as an aid to memory, as an emotional release, or for diaristic purposes, to mark one's response to a given work at a given time in order to reflect upon it at a later time. In other, more interesting cases, marginalia served the purposes of interpersonal communication. At a time when books were published in small runs and only the wealthy could afford to build private libraries, books circulated a great deal more — much as MP3s do on Kazaa. Jackson discovers fascinating dialogues going on in the margins of books.