In getting my books, I have been always solicitous of an ample margin; this not so much through any love of the thing in itself, however agreeable, as for the facility it affords me of penciling suggested thoughts, agreements and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general. Where what I have to note is too much to be included within the narrow limits of a margin, I commit it to a slip of paper, and deposit it between the leaves; taking care to secure it by an imperceptible portion of gum tragacanth paste.
— Edgar Allen Poe on marginalia
Do you write in your books? Here are some examples of annotations and marginalia by famous writers. Share yours?
From Sylvia Plath’s copy of The Great Gatsby
Christopher Hitchens’s copy of The Great Gatsby
Stanley Kubrick’s annotated copy of Stephen King’s The Shining
Mark Twain’s edits to the title page of Plutarch’s Lives of Illustrious Men
Mark Twain’s copy of The Voyage of the HMS Beagle Round the World by Darwin
Vladimir Nabokov’s copy of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis
David Foster Wallace’s annotated copy of Players by Don DeLillo
David Foster Wallace’s annotated copy of Borges: A Life by Edwin Williamson
David Foster Wallace’s annotated copy of Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
From Herman Melville’s 1837 copy of The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare
Jack Kerouac’s annotated copy of Dostoevsky’s An Unpleasant Predicament
Sir Isaac Newton’s marginalia
From John Updike’s copy of Barry Hannah’s Geronimo Rex
Allen Ginsberg’s inscriptions to fans
