At the invitation of a discreet literary journal, the booksellers of Le Feu Follet were recently asked to share their thoughts on a bibliophile’s venial sin: handwritten annotations in books—what we call marginalia. Offense to some, offering to others, this practice is as old as the book itself and has inspired our latest inquiry.

How can we trace the history and significance of these annotations that bloomed from the earliest days in the margins of printed texts?

To ask a bookseller to write about margins is to invite a stroll through his bookshop, through his story, through his identity. He cannot be objective on the matter of that curious “habit” of writing in books: he is at once its admirer and its critic, its accomplice and its witness.

How can we retrace the history and significance of these annotations, which appeared alongside the very birth of print? The moving humanist manicule scattered across incunabula; the learned commentaries of Enlightenment readers; or those precious onomastic notes that unveil the social figures behind the cryptic asterisks in La Bruyère’s Caractères (in which the author’s own name is absent from the first editions)…

QUINTUS CURTIUS
De rebus gestis Alexandri magni regis Macedonum
Giovanni Tacuino, Venice 1494

FELIX HEMMERLIN
De Nobilitate et Rusticitate Dialogus
Johann Prüss, Strasbourg [circa 1495]

JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
Les Caractères de Théophraste, avec les caractères ou mœurs de ce siècle
Thomas Amaulry, Lyon 1689

Perhaps we must begin with the history—or rather, the histories—of the margin: that blank space between the body of the text and the edge of the page, all of them drawn from “reliable sources,” which is to say… books.

The least poetic version tells of a margin that first served as a moat around the precious edifice of the text, shielding it from insects, fire, water, and the ravages of time. We give little credence to this origin story. From experience, we know that bookworms seldom attack through the margins: they tunnel straight through the binding and into the body of the book; water offers mold a playground far beyond the stain, however marginal; and fire spares neither margin, nor text, nor library.

To this pragmatic genesis, we prefer another story: the Bible. According to different sources, the margin beside the text was inspired by the Hebrew tradition of commentary surrounding the sacred text—then commentary around the commentary surrounding the sacred text. The white space would thus be the site of ultimate gloss, reflection (and mirror) of the act of reading, itself potentially destined to be printed alongside the enshrined texts it engages.

Among the earliest printed Bibles, some attempted this layout, even adding interlinear notes in addition to side glosses. Gutenberg’s B42, the famous 42-line Bible, offers only the plain text—but with remarkably wide margins.

Later on, several printer-booksellers reserved “deluxe papers” for prestigious readers: copies printed on large sheets with ample margins, to invite annotations at will. Today, booksellers and collectors still use the term “deluxe papers” for all such fine copies, even if their format rarely differs from that of standard editions.

According to this origin, marginalia—as handwritten marks left by the reader on the printed page—was not an accident, but an expectation. It would be, so to speak, the final and necessary stage in a book’s realization—from the author’s pen to that of the reader.

Of course, other sources claim that the margin was originally the space reserved for illumination. It is the painter’s hand, not the reader’s, that was meant to complete the book. And we must also add that the large margins of deluxe copies served the binder as well—offering him a more generous “margin” for trimming…

The bookseller is free to recount one version or another, with no particular preference, leaving that privilege to the books he lives among and lives off of—like the bibliophile commentator and the book-eating beetle.

And yet, whether the margin was designed for marginalia or simply allowed for it, it is, in fact, the very place where the book meets its reader. A consecrated space in which, curiously, the bookseller is one of the most fervent pilgrims.

To ask a bookseller to write about margins is, in truth, to ask for a self-portrait. For what more precise definition can be given to the antiquarian book trade than this: marginalia of the written word? Booksellers—a people of the margin.

As soon as a book completes its first life as a contemporary literary or scientific object, and acquires that prized and enigmatic status of the “rare book” (passing from the multiplicity of copies to the singularity of an individual exemplar), a host of bibliographic pens spring to life: to catalogue it, to price it, to explain it, to contextualize it, to elevate it… The most visible marginalia on an antiquarian book is often the cryptic annotation of the bookseller himself: the price (always excessive, and defying that printed by the publisher—no, Madame Bovary and Une Saison en enfer are no longer one franc), the shelfmark (though one time in ten he still loses the book), the inventory reference (traceability obliges), and above all those mysterious glyphs that secretly remind him of the purchase price, place, and date.

ARTHUR RIMBAUD
Une Saison en enfer
Alliance typographique (M.J. Poot & Cie), Brussels 1873

A certain bookseller used to annotate his books in the gutter of the rear endpaper with Roman numerals and exclamation marks that seemed to indicate importance. Years of poring over his books have left these marks largely enigmatic to me. Yet their mere presence will draw the attention of any seasoned collector familiar with this former bookseller’s discerning taste. Thus, the marginalia that likely served him to calculate his price has become a symbol of quality, a sign of a probable treasure (for this bookseller’s talent was to unearth rare and precious, yet often overlooked, works).

Finding an antiquarian book devoid of this original marginalia (and at times the accumulated notes of successive booksellers) is as rare as it is pointless an endeavour. The name given to these individualized copies—enhanced by the bookseller’s erudition—is precisely that of “livres à prix marqués” (“priced books”), a legacy of booksellers’ catalogues that stands in contrast to the unpredictable valuations of auction houses.

What is most striking, however, is that these notations—penciled in with the lightest of touches—are almost never erased by collectors. This earliest marginalia, seemingly the most circumstantial and least necessary, thus claims its place in the history of the book, and appears to be as respected by successive owners as the learned annotations penned in the margins of the first editions of Montaigne’s Essays. The bibliophile’s reverence for this most prosaic form of marginalia testifies to the special status of such secular inscriptions etched onto the timeless body of the printed book.

The publication of a book is, above all, a conclusion. Like a painter’s vernissage, the moment of printing signals the end of the author’s work. A book begins its life as a finished object. Flaubert may have despaired over the error in Sénard’s name (the printer having botched the spelling of the lawyer to whom Flaubert dedicates an epistle), but Madame Bovary would reach its first readers nonetheless. Baudelaire may have halted the printing of Les Fleurs to correct a mistake in “s’enhardissant,” yet the first copies already sold could only be amended by the author’s own hand, in the margin of the flawed and final text.

And from that moment, these hand-corrected copies become something else entirely: they have become rare books. Not older than their uncorrected or properly printed siblings, but marked by the presence of a unique identity through handwritten intervention. Once a finished object, the antiquarian book reverts to being a work-in-progress—this time, shaped by its readers. If the new book is the author’s proposition, the rare book is the readers’ appropriation. Thus, a book may become “old” the moment it leaves the press.

Such is the case with the celebrated modern “deluxe papers,” acquired directly from the publisher by collectors eager to preserve, in enduring form, these rare witnesses to the work’s first condition. Acquiring a copy printed on these luxury papers is a declaration that the work is worthy of transmission—worthy of being housed in its most noble and lasting form: one of a handful of copies on Japon, China, Dutch handmade or pure rag paper, printed separately and immediately hand-numbered or press-numbered—an editorial marginalia in its own right.

It is then that the second type of marginalia enters the scene—far more significant than a bookseller’s notation or an editor’s number, though it mirrors both: the ex-libris.

Today, it is most often a personalized stamp on the inside cover. But it first took the form of a handwritten name, sometimes preceded by the explicit “this book belongs to,” or even by the curiously anthropomorphic “I belong to.” Indeed, the tradition of handwritten ownership has not vanished—far from it. It is more vibrant than the luxurious collector’s stamp. It merely signals a different relationship to the book so marked. The handwritten ex-libris is now the proud declaration of the child who loves their book and makes it their own, even challenging the author by inscribing their own name—a graffiti of the young reader on the wall of Knowledge.

Guido PAPE
Statuta Delphinatus. Libertates per illustrissimos principes delphinos viennenses
Franciscum Pichatum et Bartholomeum Bertoletum, Grenoble [1508]

Octave MIRBEAU
L’épidémie (copy of Jules Renard)
Librairie Charpentier et Fasquelle, Paris 1898

The author of Poil de Carotte had a splendid fox-profile ex-libris drawn for him by his friend Toulouse-Lautrec to mark the books in his library—while his younger readers still proudly write their names in brightly coloured ink on the first page of their Bibliothèque verte copy. Stamp or signature, the “I” is the same—only the reader’s relationship to the book differs. To affix one’s mark of ownership is to assert a form of authority within the book by merging with its form, and to take part in its identity by adding the reader’s name to the author-publisher duo.

Here truly begins the life of the book—through this symbolic appropriation that speaks not to the author but to the community of readers. Manuscript or printed, the ex-libris weaves a visible ink-thread linking readers across the centuries, while the odious ex-dono (the mark left by someone offering a book they did not write) often bears witness only to the giver’s wish to eclipse the gift itself—unless, of course, the donated copy of Le Poëme de Saint-François by “a poor Franciscan of the third order” turns out to be the very volume Franz Liszt offered at the end of his life to his first love, Adèle de La Prunarède.

Anatole de SÉGUR
Le Poëme de Saint-François (copy offered by Franz Liszt)
Librairie Poussielgue et Fils, Paris 1866

The history of the ex-libris is a compelling one for those interested in that of marginalia.

This tradition took shape well before the invention of the printing press, at a time when a book was by nature never complete, always a living object with the potential for ongoing transformation—its contents capable of expanding over centuries. Thus, the reader was never fully distinct from the writer, nor was their contribution entirely marginal. Was not the work itself often that of a “reader-copyist”?

Despite the fluidity between writer and reader that characterizes medieval manuscripts, the ex-libris (ex-libris meis) inscribes a special connection between the original text and its reader. It asserts a bond of exclusivity not to be taken lightly, as Yann Sordet notes in his Histoire du livre et de l’édition, citing a 12th-century ex-libris: “Iste liber est fratris Mathei […] Pendus soit il qui l’emblera (may he be hanged who steals it). Amen.” (Albin Michel, 2021, p. 159)

This radical form of ex-libris symbolically halts the circulation of the book—that is, its life as an antiquarian object. The modern version of this status might be the institutional stamp placed on a title page, forbidding any future circulation ad vitam aeternam of the copy so “marked.”

But the resemblance ends there: the medieval manuscript differs from the printed book far more deeply than by its mode of production. A unique object—where the printed book is one of many—it is usually made from the outset for a specific reader, whose name it bears at the beginning, sometimes even before the text is written. Should it change hands, the new owner has only to add their name within the text, commission new illuminations or glosses, or paint their arms into the manuscript—thus giving it a renewed life without altering its nature.

Every manuscript belongs to a reader, and the ex-libris seals that bond more than it creates it. The natural link becomes a written law—but the vehemence of this claim of ownership underscores the profoundly vital nature of the manuscript, whose journey the ex-libris seeks to conclude by imposing a final, definitive mark.

If the reader’s act of claiming ownership over a work predates the invention of printing, it is only with Gutenberg’s press—and the distance it introduced between the work and its reading—that the ex-libris paradoxically attained its full distinction.

Let us set aside, once again, coats of arms on bindings. While they share a similar intention—signaling ownership—they fall outside the scope of our inquiry, which focuses on the intimate bond between reader and work, not on the social or political constructs of knowledge possession and displays of power. Indeed, ex-libris are not the emblems of the poor, but the quills of those enriched by their reading.

The curious migratory geography of these ex-libris through the pages of books since the 15th century illustrates their intimate link to the title page. Before its invention, authorial and publishing information appeared at the end of the book, forming with the date what is known as the colophon. It is typically in this space that the earliest ex-libris may be found (heraldic arms, even when painted within the book, are generally placed at the front).

It was only at the beginning of the 16th century, with the formal emergence of the title page, that the ex-libris moved accordingly. Initially placed at the bottom of the title page—close to the publisher’s imprint—it gradually rose to the upper margin over the course of the 16th and 17th centuries, while remaining for some time at the heart of the page itself.

Then, in the following centuries, it migrated to the front flyleaf, where it remained so long as it was handwritten, while the printed stamp came to be affixed to the inside front board—precisely opposite the place where armorial stamps were once tooled onto the binding’s exterior.

And what was the purpose of this blank flyleaf? Before the invention of the title page, it was the space reserved for handwritten titles. It survived the rise of printed title pages, serving as a kind of ephemeral handwritten half-title while awaiting the binding. Even after half-titles came to be printed, books continued to feature a blank page—a silent shield for the work as it left the press, unbound and uncovered, sold thus in a temporary paper wrapper chosen from cast-off sheets of handmade paper. To this day, even after the rise of printed covers, this blank page remains an integral part of a book’s composition, despite having no technical or practical function.

If the silence that follows a Mozart piece is still Mozart, the blank page before a written work does not belong to the author. It belongs entirely and from the outset to the reader. Like the final flyleaf—whose role is much the same—these two pages are the exclusive domain of the reader, whether to jot down page numbers worth remembering, scholarly remarks, a hastily scribbled phone number, a cryptic little drawing, or a grocery list—none will challenge the reader’s right to leave marginal notes on this reserved space. It is also where the gift-giver will inscribe their fond dedication: “For my nephew, who reminds me of Poil de Carotte.”

Writers themselves almost never use this page for their “inscribed copies.”

These dedications by authors—written in copies given to friends or entrusted to critical readers—only became widespread in the 19th century, when the idea of equality among men allowed for this personal gesture of self-giving, a gesture previously tightly regulated by the conventions of hierarchical power (one did not dedicate a book to a person of lower rank, while a person of high status had the right to a printed dedication at the beginning of the work; only handwritten dedications between equals were deemed acceptable).

Aside from a few rare and precious pre-19th-century exceptions, authorial dedications are a relatively recent phenomenon. Like the ex-libris, they took some time to find their place within the book. They first made a brief appearance on the cover or title page, usually unsigned—perhaps to avoid redundancy with the printed name. These early inscriptions are often laconic, reduced to the phrase “homage of the author,” without necessarily naming the recipient.

But these dedications quickly gained substance. They soon expanded in scope and migrated quite naturally—almost simultaneously—to the half-title page: the first page of printed text, yet sufficiently blank to offer this exceptional marginalia a space suited to its symbolic importance. For the gift of an original work before its exposure to the public eye—a named dedication, signed by the author—reconnects with the tradition of the manuscript, explicitly addressed to a particular reader and fully assumed through the author’s autograph seal. This marginalia is one that transforms a multiple into a unique work.

When George Sand offers Histoire de ma vie to François Rollinat—a book that contains one of the most beautiful chapters on friendship in all of French literature, precisely about their relationship—her brief dedication “à mon ami Rollinat” is not merely the sharing of a masterwork. It is the gift of that friendship itself. And that simple “my friend” weaves a discreet and intimate bond with Sand’s radiant prose: “Our friendship is infinity. All else is time, the earth, and human life.” By the very multiplicity of the book as object, this private friendship becomes a declaration to the world, and the gifted copy its point of origin. On that half-title page, the handwritten dedication becomes the sublime echo of the printed title: “à mon ami Rollinat, George Sand. / Histoire de ma vie.”

For their marginalia, authors thus choose the most seemingly useless page of the printed book—and bestow upon it a new authority that, for this copy at least, governs the entire reading experience. It implies that the work which follows must be read under the auspices of this singular gift and the relationship it conveys between author and recipient—whether that be the influential critic whose review may shape the book’s reception (“To Maurice Blanchot, Albert Camus”), the literary judge who might spark its success (as when Proust addresses Swann “Homage of the author to Monsieur Lucien Descaves,” a prominent Goncourt juror), the muse who inspired it (such as Hugo’s dedication to Juliette Drouet, his lover and confidante of forty years: “To Madame Juju, signed Monsieur Toto”), or the banker-friend from whom the poet hopes for more than just praise (“To Tenré, in memory of good camaraderie, Baudelaire” inscribed in the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal).

Albert CAMUS
L'été (exemplaire offert à Maurice Blanchot)
Gallimard, Paris 1954
 
 
 
Marcel PROUST
A la recherche du temps perdu (exemplaire offert à Lucien Descaves)
Grasset & Nrf, Paris 1913-1927

 
Victor HUGO
Théâtre de Victor Hugo (exemplaire offert à Juliette Drouet)
Michel Levy Frères, Paris 1847
 
 
 
Charles BAUDELAIRE
Les Fleurs du mal (exemplaire offert à Ludovic Tenré)
Poulet-Malassis & De Broise, Paris 1857

By a tacit, never-formalized convention, authors have almost unanimously chosen this page for their marginalia.
Among the rare dissenters to this unspoken tradition is Marcel Proust, who generally inscribed his dedications on the flyleaf. Yet the flyleaf of his Swann, self-published at great personal cost, is a tissue-thin, poor-quality paper—leaving each reader to interpret the significance of a dedication inscribed upon so fragile a support.

Estranged from himself, as from his narrator Marcel, Proust signs at the threshold of his literary monument without stepping inside. Already a reader of his own work, he sometimes even composes, on that pristine page, a new piece of writing to which—supreme modesty—he attributes another authorship. Such is the case with the lengthy dedication to Jean Béraud in his very first work, Les Plaisirs et les jours, where he disguises a highly personal theory of art as an “excerpt from an old book on aesthetics.”

Marcel PROUST
Les Plaisirs et les jours (copy offered to Jean Béraud)
Calmann Lévy, Paris 1896

A space for readers, yes—but above all, a space for writing, much to the dismay of booksellers who would sometimes prefer to erase these inked interjections when they “contribute nothing” to the history of the work (and more prosaically, diminish its market value…).

For in these margins, the reader offers far more than an identity. One finds, for instance, bibliographic notes that ought not to be mistaken for objective data.

Such marginalia are above all a treasure trove of insight into the conditions of a work’s reception. They reveal the reader, not the author:

• Their interests (“condemned to death March 24, 1794” scribbled in a book by Cloots),

• Their objections (like the reader correcting Montesquieu’s views on northern and southern peoples: “braver? No”),

• Their bibliophilic erudition (the note by S. de Guaita in his copy of Vigenère’s Traicté des chiffres now serves as a key bibliographic reference),

• Their relationship to the work (“see my note on him…”),

• Or to its price (“la ligatura costa 1 lira 10 solidi”),

• Their prudery (erased nude engravings—or censored textual references),

• Their assessment (“Terrible book, deserving of the flames”),

• And, of course, their readerly verdict (such as Robert Desnos’s Cambronnian retort to the gift of a book by Aurel: “SHIT. Robert Desnos”).

And then there are inscriptions entirely unrelated to the book, which has been repurposed as a notebook.

 
Ludvig Baron de HOLBERG
Voyage de Nicolas Klimius dans le monde souterrain. (exemplaire de Stanislas de Guaïta)
Chez Frid. Chretien Pelt., à Copenhague et à Lipsic 1753
 
 
 
Scévole de SAINTE-MARTHE
Les Œuvres de Scevole de Sainte Marthe (exemplaire aux armes de Hesselin)
par Mamert Patisson au logis de Robert Estienne., à Paris 1589
 
 
 
Jean de LERY
Histoire d'un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil, dite Amérique
Pour Jean Vignon, à Genève 1611
 
 
 
Judah ABRAVANEL (dit Léon l'Hébreu)
Philosophie d'amour de M. Léon Hébreu
Guillaume Rouillé, Lyon 1551
 
 
 
 
J’ai oublié le titre de celui-ci (un mauvais livre sans doute)
 
 
AUREL
Rodin devant la femme (exemplaire offert à Robert Desnos)
Maison du livre, Paris 1919
 
 
 
 
Guillaume PEPIN
Rosarium aureum mysticum nuper etitum [Suivi de] De secretis secretorum nuncupatum
Apud Joannem Parvum, Paris 1525

And then there is the white ink—the reader’s eloquent silence. It speaks in this copy offered by the author, its pages half uncut (proof of the reader’s fatigue); in another, by contrast, a sumptuous binding commissioned by the collector reflects his reverence. Yet doubtless the dishevelled condition of a third copy stems from the same passion. A bedside book, a travel companion, a field guide, a work tool—a cherished relic carried everywhere—beloved books bear the scars of their history.

Cocked bindings from overuse, dog-eared pages, coffee or wine rings, flecks of paint, underlining, checkmarks, exclamation or question marks: these silent traces all testify to the active presence of the reader—to the possession not just of the book, but of the work. Whether they treat the object with manic care or brutal indifference, true readers lay claim to the work by subtly transforming the book itself.

Sanctified or domesticated, the book bears the marks of its reader—but the ink spilled upon the consecrated space effects a transubstantiation that should not be attributed to the printed book prior to this act, which is far more a sacrament than a sacrilege.

For printing is a purely technical act. It implies no judgment of the work, no encounter between a desire to speak and a desire to listen. Omitting the publisher (who is, after all, the first reader—and no minor one, investing money, reputation, and sometimes even life itself in the service of the printed word—but that is another story), the printed book is like Collodi’s puppet: a fine object of craftsmanship, yet lifeless. Upon leaving the press, the author—like Geppetto—can only hope his creation comes to life.

But when a reader touches the opened work with their ink-tipped wand, the magic occurs, and the encounter takes place. That singular gesture is the poet’s knighthood, the recognition of a peer, the secular blessing of the anonymous reader. This marginalia is the sign of our community—that of the written word—which makes the work our work, and the site of our shared humanity.

Bookseller’s fancy? Then what of the Internet—that new medium, the perfect heir to Gutenberg’s great history of knowledge dissemination? Behold: it reinvents the marginalia. At the foot of every post—erudite or crude, documented or invented—every reader may leave their reaction, to the text or to a previous reaction, or to whatever else they choose, right up to the famous Godwin’s Law. And what do we call this discourse upon discourse that saturates the web? The “comment.”