Marginalia Exhibition

If you like to write notes, jokes, or insults into the margins of the books you read, you may be interested to know that you’re part of a centuries-long tradition. With recent commentary by the New York Review of Books, there is a new exhibition at the New York Society Library “explores the practice of reading through the many handwritten notes left in the margins of books”

This exhibition is among the first of its kind to focus explicitly on annotated books. As evidenced by recent pieces in the New York Times and the New Yorker , interest in annotations has grown substantially in recent years. Digital projects to track readers’ responses to texts, such as Annotated Books Online , Book Traces , and The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe , have all drawn attention to the ways that annotations assist scholars in their efforts to better understand the reading practices of the past.