Marginalia: Why Readers Write in Books

By Lucy Levine · Updated November 3, 2026

Marginalia are the notes readers write in the margins of their books, and some of the best criticism in English was written there first. The word itself was put into circulation by a compulsive annotator, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Here is the history of writing in books, the famous annotators who made it an art, and the case for picking up a pencil.

Where the word marginalia came from

It was Coleridge, writes John Gross in the New York Review of Books, who launched the Latin word on its English career. Around 1807, in his mid-thirties, he became known for annotating books in elaborate detail, and friends encouraged him to mark up their copies. In 1819, when he published some notes he had written years earlier in a volume of Sir Thomas Browne, he chose the then unfamiliar title Marginalia.

There is a footnote to the footnote. H. J. Jackson, co-editor of the Princeton edition of Coleridge’s marginalia, explains on the Oxford University Press blog that the Oxford English Dictionary credits Blackwood’s magazine with the word ahead of him, but that the Blackwood’s article was contributed by Coleridge himself under a pseudonym. Either way, the word is his.

Coleridge in other people’s books

Coleridge’s comments on around 450 works survive, in some 8,000 separate notes, according to Gross; the modern Princeton edition runs to six volumes. Many of them are in his friends’ books. His friend Charles Lamb, who lost a good many books to him, still recommended lending to him:

lend thy books; but let it be to such a one as S.T.C.–he will return them (generally anticipating the time appointed) with usury; enriched with annotations, tripling their value.

Charles Lamb, “The Two Races of Men”, Elia (London Magazine, December 1820)

Lamb’s editor E. V. Lucas lists several of these books. In Lamb’s copy of Donne’s poems Coleridge apologised in advance, in the most Coleridgean way possible:

I shall die soon, my dear Charles Lamb, and then you will not be vexed that I have scribbled your book. S.T.C., 2d May, 1811

Coleridge’s note in Lamb’s Donne, quoted in E. V. Lucas’s notes to Elia

Lamb’s Beaumont and Fletcher folio, Lucas adds, was by then safe in the British Museum. On one page of it Coleridge wrote O flat! flat! flat! Sole! Flounder! Place! all stinking! stinkingly flat! and at the foot of the page, in October 1811, added another excuse: I gone, you will not mind my having spoiled a book in order to leave a Relic.

That is marginalia at its best: a real critical judgment, a joke, and a friendship, all on the same page.

Poe’s “Marginalia” columns

Edgar Allan Poe used Coleridge’s word for a run of magazine pieces, from the Democratic Review in November 1844 to the Southern Literary Messenger in June 1849. His introduction is the best description of the habit by a practitioner:

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 pencilling suggested thoughts, agreements, and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general.
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Edgar Allan Poe, “Marginalia”, Democratic Review, November 1844

When a note would not fit, he wrote it on a slip of paper and fixed it between the leaves with an imperceptible portion of gum tragacanth paste. More interesting is his claim about why margins produce better writing than notebooks:

In the marginalia, too, we talk only to ourselves; we therefore talk freshly–boldly–originally–with abandonnement–without conceit

Edgar Allan Poe, “Marginalia” (1844)

Poe’s columns were, of course, published, so the privacy was partly a pose. But the point stands: a note written for no audience is often truer than one written for an editor. He also distrusted notes made only to remember things, which puts him at odds with the commonplace book tradition.

The most famous margin in mathematics

The margin that cost the most effort belongs to Pierre de Fermat. According to the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive at the University of St Andrews, Fermat wrote in the margin of his copy of Bachet’s translation of Diophantus’s Arithmetica that he had a truly remarkable proof of what became known as Fermat’s Last Theorem, which the margin was too small to contain. His notes became known only after his son Samuel published an edition of Bachet’s translation with his father’s notes in 1670. MacTutor adds that Fermat’s “proof” is now believed to have been wrong, and that the theorem itself was finally proved by Andrew Wiles, whose corrected proof of November 1994 has been accepted.

Other great annotators

Gross’s review of Jackson’s book Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (Yale University Press) is a tour of the field. He notes that the annotations of Blake and Keats, like Coleridge’s, have acquired the status of literature in their own right. Among Jackson’s livelier exhibits is William Beckford dismissing a volume of Robert Southey’s ballads as “doodlesome”. Hester Lynch Piozzi filled hundreds of books with marginalia, which were dispersed in sales after her death.

Beckford turns up again in the collector A. Edward Newton’s Amenities of Book-Collecting: Newton owned a Disraeli first edition with many pages of Beckford’s notes, and observed that Beckford seems to have read the volumes with unnecessary care. An annotated copy, in other words, can be the most valuable thing on a shelf; see our guide to building a book collection for why provenance matters.

Herman Melville’s annotated library is now searchable. The Melville’s Marginalia Online project catalogues his surviving books, among them a seven-volume Boston edition of Shakespeare (Hilliard, Gray, 1837) and Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse, both held at Harvard’s Houghton Library.

Annotator	Where the notes are	What they show
Samuel Taylor Coleridge	About 450 works, some 8,000 notes; many in friends’ books	Criticism, jokes, apologies
Edgar Allan Poe	“Marginalia” columns from 1844	Margins as a literary form
Pierre de Fermat	His Bachet Arithmetica, published by his son in 1670	A claim not proved until 1994
William Beckford	Books by Southey, Disraeli and others	Scorn, and very close reading
Hester Lynch Piozzi	Hundreds of books, dispersed after her death	Gossip and memory
Herman Melville	Surviving library, catalogued online	A novelist reading his sources

The case for writing in your books

Jackson also describes the opposite end of the spectrum: the student textbook with nearly every line in yellow highlighter, which, left behind on a bus, nobody would carry off: it is unlovable and unsalable. Highlighting is not marginalia. It records that you read something, not what you thought about it.

Good marginalia is short, specific and argumentative. Write a question, a disagreement, a cross-reference to another book, the date you read it. Use pencil if the book is valuable. In twenty years the notes will tell you who you were when you read it, and if you lend the book, they will tell the borrower something too. For lines worth arguing with, start with our quotes about reading.

The last word goes to Lamb, who knew what Coleridge’s scribbling was worth. Of the books Coleridge marked, he wrote that the notes were in matter oftentimes, and almost in quantity not unfrequently, vying with the originals.