Marginalia - a private exchange between reader and story
But I think he underestimates the extent to which most readers value annotations precisely because they are a private exchange between themselves and whatever book they happen to be talking back to. O’Connell, 2012
The author of this piece is referring to the writer Sam Anderson, who wrote the New York Times Magazine article ‘What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text’. In that article, Anderson speaks of a system where readers can share margin notes with future readers, and read the thoughts of past readers. The author of this article, Mark O’Connell, states that the problem with this system is that often the type of marginalia that is the most meaningful is also the most intimate – not meant to be shared with the world. Take this later sentence in the article:
A book someone has written in is an oddly intimate object; like an item of clothing once worn by a person now passed away, it retains something of its former owner’s presence.
see also
references
- O'Connell, Mark. `The Marginal Obsession with Marginalia.` The New Yorker, 26 Jan. 2012, www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-marginal-obsession-with-marginalia.
- Anderson, Sam. `What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text`. New York Times Magazine, 6 Mar. 2011, [https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/magazine/06Riff-t.html?pagewanted=2&ref=magazine].