Erik Schmitt’s obsession with marginalia–handwritten scribbles or notes in the margins of books–began after he inherited a chunk of his grandfather’s library. Handwritten in the white spaces of the ...

We all know medieval marginalia is full of some pretty sick snail fights. No one knows why, exactly, but there are hundreds of old drawings of snails in combat with knights in old manuscripts. The ...

Unlikely as it may sound, the study of such annotations is a recognized academic specialty, albeit an arcane one. There’s even a word for them, “marginalia,” coined by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge ...

I recently bought a history of 19th-century France from a reputable second-hand books site, where its condition was described as “very good”. When it arrived, I was dismayed to find it scrawled all ...

Do you write in the margins of books? Have you borrowed a book from a friend and curiously read any thoughts they penned in the margins? Have you written notes or underlined passages in religious ...

To the many reasons we have for admiring Marlene Dietrich can now be added the fact that she was an inveterate scribbler in books. In a volume describing the love affair between Laurence Olivier and ...

At Steven Wolf Fine Arts, "The Marginalia Archive" by Washington, D.C., artist Molly Springfield extends her practice of drawing printed and handwritten text, and adds a social dimension. Some time ...