Jackson 2001

Heather Jackson. Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. Yale UP, 2001. Web.

Intro

• 2 How do we explain the discrepancy between worthless notes and priceless ones?
  • "easy to dismiss the products of our own age"
  • "Western consumer societies are inclined to despise used goods"
• Readers' notes in books are a familiar but unexamined phenomenon.
• 5 Though the annotator herself can hardly have been aware of the fact, her practice in annotation is consistent with centuries of tradition reaching back far beyond the birth of print.
  • she also mentions the digital products with annotation features -- here the digital catching up with the print or manuscript (see Stallybrass 2002)
• 6 Given the recent shift of attention from the writer to the reader and to the production, dissemination, and reception of texts, marginalia of all periods would appear to be potentially a goldmine for scholars...Critics disagree, however, about the reliability of readers' notes, and consequently about the ways in which they might legitimately be used to reconstruct either a reading environment or the mental experience of a particular reader.
  • and there just aren't enough annotated books for it to be the sole basis of a history of reading -- see Knight 2015, Knight 2013
• methodological caution: ...the sample set of works [~2000] has no claim to being exhaustive or representative or even statistically significant. It is large and diverse enough, nevertheless, to expose basic patterns in readers' practice.
  • 13 It does not aim to be comprehensive, only to set out the history and conventions of a wide-spread custom by reference to a substantial body of specific cases.
  • Sherman 2008 similarly situates his findings
• 7 Coleridge as occupying a "pivotal position in the history of marginalia in English" (he brought the word into English in 1819) - prolific annotator
  • his annotated books published (i.e. the notes) by the Victorians and collected at the BL
• 9 cataloguing collecting practices shaping scholarly horizons: "Catalogues therefore normally record the presence of marginalia only when they are authorial or associated with a famous name"
• 17 high degree of continuity of practices [over period 1700-2000]