LucyLevine

Notes & Essays

Short essays on the habits of reading and looking: the commonplace book, marginalia, reading aloud, bookplates, and poems that describe paintings. Each one traces a real history with its sources named.

Close-up of old leather book spines with gold tooling

Ex Libris: A Short History of the Bookplate

A small printed label that says whose book this is, and often much more. Where bookplates came from, what they show, and why collectors...

A person reading a book in an armchair beside a wood stove fire

A Short History of Reading Aloud

For most of history, reading meant reading out loud. From monastery refectories to Dickens's public readings and Victorian family evenings, how the habit worked...

An old open book of poems beside dark red flowers

Ekphrasis: When Poems Describe Paintings

Keats on an urn, Auden on Brueghel, Williams on the same Brueghel. What ekphrasis is, and what a poem can see in a painting...

A reader writing notes with a pencil in the margin of an open book

Marginalia: Why Readers Write in Books

Some of the best criticism ever written is in the margins. The history of writing in books, the famous annotators, and the case for...

An open notebook filled with handwriting, with a pen resting on it

A Short History of the Commonplace Book

Before quote sites, readers copied lines into a notebook by hand. Where the habit came from, how readers from John Locke to Thomas Jefferson...

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