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 ...

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 ...

“In getting my books,” Edgar Allan Poe wrote in 1844, “I have always been solicitous of an ample margin; this is not so much through any love of the thing in itself, however agreeable, as for the ...

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 ...