Reading in the Margins of a Used Book

For nineteen years I sold second-hand books from a shop on a steep street in Trieste, and for most of those years I kept a notebook under the counter. In it I copied out the things people had written in the margins of the books that came through the shop. I did not plan to keep it for so long. It began because I found a note I could not stop thinking about, and I wanted to be able to find it again after the book was sold.

The note was in pencil, in the margin of a novel about a family of shipbuilders, beside a paragraph in which a father explains to his son why he will never leave the town where he was born. Someone had underlined the paragraph twice and written next to it, in very small letters: not true, he left in 1961. That was all. No name, no date other than the year. I have never found out who wrote it or who they meant.

The anthology nobody edited

The notebook now runs to four volumes and something over three thousand entries. When I sold the shop I kept it, and I still add to it from time to time, when I buy a book at a market and find that someone has been there before me.

It is the only anthology I will ever finish, and it has no editor. The entries arrive in the order the books did. A furious note in a history of the Habsburgs sits next to a shopping list in a book of recipes. A long argument with a philosopher, conducted across forty pages in green ink, is followed by a single word, yes, written beside the last line of a love poem. Some notes are clever. Most are not. A surprising number are apologies, addressed to the book, for having folded a corner.

What they have in common is that they were written by people who did not expect to be read. That is what makes them valuable. A published text is always performing, even when it is honest. A note in a margin is a person talking to themselves in a room they think is empty.

What people write

After twenty years I can say a few things about marginalia with some confidence.

People argue more than they agree. Exclamation marks and question marks outnumber ticks by about three to one. The most heavily annotated books are not the difficult ones but the ones that touch a nerve: books about divorce, about fathers, about leaving home. Poetry is annotated less than prose, but when it is, the notes are more personal. Children's books are almost never annotated, except by children, who write their names.

People write dates. They write the names of places, often places where they were when they read that page. They write the names of other people, sometimes with a question mark. And every few hundred books, someone writes something that is clearly not about the book at all, but that had to be written down somewhere and the book was the nearest paper.

Tuesday. The results were fine. I am going to finish this book after all.

I found that in the back of a detective novel, on the blank page after the last chapter. I have thought about it at least once a week for eleven years.

Why I never looked for them

People ask whether I ever tried to find the authors of these notes. Some of the books had names on the flyleaf, and one or two had addresses. I could have written. I never did.

It is partly a matter of manners. The notes were private, and my copying them into a notebook is already a small trespass. Tracking down the people who wrote them would turn that trespass into something else.

But it is also that the notes are complete as they are. The person who wrote not true, he left in 1961 does not need to be found. They said what they needed to say to the only listener they had, which was the book. I happened to be the next reader. That is what second-hand books are: a conversation you arrive at halfway through, and are welcome to join, as long as you do not ask the other people in the room for their names.

When I sell a book now, I sometimes leave a note of my own in the margin. Nothing much. A date, or a single word beside a line I liked. I do it for the next reader, whoever they are. I hope they argue with me.