Marginal Notes: Social Reading and the Literal Margins offers an account of literary marginalia based on original research from a range of unique archival sources, from mid-16th-century France to early 20th-century Tasmania. Chapters examine marginal commentary from 17th-century China, 18th-century Britain, and 19th-century America, investigating the reputations, as reflected by attentive readers, of He Zhou, Pierre Bayle, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Warton, and Sir Walter Scott. The marginal writers include Jacques Gohory, Mary Astell, Hester Thrale, Herman Melville, the young daughters of the Broome family in Gloucestershire, and the patrons of the library of the Huon Mechanics Institute, Tasmania. Though marginalia is often proscribed and frequently hidden or overlooked, the collection reveals the enduring power of marginalia, concluding with studies of the ethics of annotation and the resurrected life of marginalia in digital environments.
1. Introduction: Writing Between the Lines, Paul Tankard and Patrick
Spedding.- 2. Jacques Gohorys Copy of the Poliphile (1546): A First Analysis
of His Handwritten Marginalia, Véronique Duché-Gavet.- 3. The Marginalia of a
Seventeenth-century Chinese Scholar, Yinzong Wei.- 4. Undoing Bayles
Scepticism: Astells Marginalia as Disarmament, Jacqueline Broad.- 5. Hester
Piozzis Annotations to the Adventurer and Johnsons Rambler: Beyond the Case
Study, Paul Tankard.- 6. Cest Mon Livre ce nest pas le tien mon ami:
Inscriptions in an English Childrens Book Collection, Merete Colding
Smith.- 7. The Encyclopędia Britannica and The Huon Mechanics Institute
Library, Patrick Spedding and Peter Pereyra.- 8. Probability Indispensable
in Fiction: Marginalia in a copy of Sir Walter Scotts The Antiquary, Brian
McMullin.- 9. Almost Unknown to the General Reader: Biographical and
Conceptual Contexts of Melvilles Marginalia in Thomas Wartons The History
of English Poetry, Steven Olsen-Smith and Cheyene Austin, et al..- 10. The
Ethics of Annotation: Reading, Studying and Defacing Books in Australia,
Patrick Buckridge.- 11. Locating Digitised Marginalia, Mia
Goodwin.- 12. Afterword, Bill Sherman.
Patrick Spedding is Head of Literary Studies at Monash University, Australia, and Associate Director of the Centre for the Book. His current research focuses on book ownership, marginalia, and reading practices in the 18th centuryespecially among the readers of Eliza Haywoodand the publication, distribution, and survival of 18th-century erotica. He is the author of A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood (2004), and the editor of many historical literary texts.
Paul Tankard teaches and researches in English at the University of Otago, New Zealand. His chief scholarly interests are Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, the Inklings, paratextuality, and the future of literacy. In 2017 his pioneering edition of Boswells journalism, Facts and Inventions, won the Bibliographical Society of Americas Mitchell Prize. He teaches writing and fantasy (particularly Tolkien and C.S Lewis) and edits the Johnson Society ofAustralia Papers.
