Marginalia are on the march. The
New Yorker reported this fall on Oxford’s Marginalia Group, which “now has two thousand
five hundred and three members, making marginalia to Oxford something like what a cappella
is to Princeton.” They specialize in finding the snarkiest of the notes that generations
of Oxford students have entered in their assigned books. The creator of the Oxford group,
April Pierce, noted that the great libraries of London also house books full of readers’
written reactions. The London Library’s copy of Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations,
for example, contains such striking remarks—some clearly motivated by the text, some
apparently not—as “What the devil does this mean?” and “above all there should be cake.”
They were entered by T.S. Eliot, who bought the book at Marburg in 1914.
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