Marginal Notes

Marginal Notes: Social Reading and the Literal Margins offers an account of literary marginalia based on original research from a range of unique archival sources, from mid-16^th-century France to early 20^th-century Tasmania. Chapters examine marginal commentary from 17^th-century China, 18^th-century Britain, and 19^th-century America, investigating the reputations, as reflected by attentive readers, of He Zhou, Pierre Bayle, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Warton, and Sir Walter Scott. The marginal writers include Jacques Gohory, Mary Astell, Hester Thrale, Herman Melville, the young daughters of the Broome family in Gloucestershire, and the patrons of the library of the Huon Mechanics’ Institute, Tasmania. Though marginalia is often proscribed and frequently hidden or overlooked, the collection reveals the enduring power of marginalia, concluding with studies of the ethics of annotation and the resurrected life of marginalia in digital environments.

“The diverse and absorbing essays in this volume provide a fascinating introduction to the world of the annotating reader. Books, scrolls, and manuscripts have been written on by readers for millennia. The essays in Marginal Notes throw open a window onto these material traces of reading, giving us an insight into why readers across time and geographical space have been so drawn to the act of writing in books.” (Edmund G. C. King, Lecturer in English, The Open University, UK)

“Marginal Notes offers both a series of fascinating studies of particular annotated books, and an account of the long historical development of marginal annotations, from the 15^th to the 21^st centuries, across a wide geographical scale. This is the ranging account of marginalia that we’ve long needed, shot through with a thrill and a witty delight in its subject. As Tankard and Spedding show, studying marginal annotations means attending both to the fascinating specificities of a particular marked page, and also to much broader considerations about the history of reading and our relationship to texts.” (Adam Smyth, Professor of English Literature and the History of the Book, Balliol College, Oxford University, UK)

“Marginalia studies are fascinating in their plasticity and range. This collection moves smoothly between texts from Renaissance Europe, 17^th-century China, 19^th-century Australia, and the modern, digital era. It offers a distinctively global view of marginalia, which the editors see as a record of the act of studying: for Spedding and Tankard, marginalia sit on the bridge between reading and writing, looking both ways, as the river of text flows beneath.” (Katherine Acheson, Professor, English Language and Literature, University of Waterloo, Canada, and editor of Early Modern English Marginalia (2018))

Patrick Spedding is Head of Literary Studies at Monash University, Australia, and Associate Director of the Centre for the Book. His current research focuses on book ownership, marginalia, and reading practices in the 18^th century—especially among the readers of Eliza Haywood—and the publication, distribution, and survival of 18^th-century erotica. He is the author of A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood (2004), and the editor of many historical literary texts.

Paul Tankard teaches and researches in English at the University of Otago, New Zealand. His chief scholarly interests are Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, the Inklings, paratextuality, and the future of literacy. In 2017 his pioneering edition of Boswell’s journalism, Facts and Inventions, won the Bibliographical Society of America’s Mitchell Prize. He teaches writing and fantasy (particularly Tolkien and C.S Lewis) and edits the Johnson Society ofAustralia Papers.