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 ...

Marginalia is having a moment. While many people consider it sacrilege to write — whether with pencil or pen — in the blank spots on the pages of a print book, there are also those who celebrate 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Readers are sharing how they write their predictions into novels, colour-code their emotional responses and even gift annotated books to friends. Is it actually fun, or just a bit like homework? There ...