I like to mark up my books as much as the next person. I bracket passages. Sometimes I write little notes for myself in the margins. I’ve even dog-eared a page or two. Importantly, however, I mark up my books: my ragged, Amazon-used paperbacks and thrift-store pulp. Go to Alderman Library and pick out a book: you’ll find the marginalia of a dozen readers before you — odd stars, arrows, checks and scrawls on every other page. At first I found it stirred in me a certain nostalgia for times passed, but now I just find it annoying. Please, stop writing in the library books.
A heinous example: in the margin of page 570, in a certain Alderman copy of “Jane Eyre,” there’s a question written out in red ink. This is the part when Mr. Rochester — the thinking man’s Mr. Darcy — proposes to Jane Eyre for a second time. It’s touching and beautiful stuff. A house fire had, unbeknownst to Jane in her and her lover’s long estrangement, blinded both of Rochester’s eyes and taken his hand. Newly crippled, sightless and loveless, Rochester falls into despondency until, months later, Jane goes back to him. I read that Jane cares nothing for Rochester’s deficiencies, and loves him more when she can “really be useful” to him than when he was in his “state of proud independence.” I glance to the left, and scrawled there, unabashedly, is a question for Jane: “What are you, his mother?”
In retrospect it’s a pretty funny poke at the Victorian ideal of romance and the woman’s marital role. But after nearly 600 pages of a book one gets pretty invested, and by that point all I wanted was to see Jane and Rochester declare their everlasting love — since they’re so perfect for each other. I don’t want to criticize their romance; I want to revel, grossly, like a hog in the mud, in the soppy sentiment. Whoever wrote that in the margin — I can’t say ruined — but definitely detracted from my experience finishing “Jane Eyre.” That reader with the red pen wounded my appreciation of the novel by thrusting his cynicism and discontent into the text. I’ll always think of that when I remember “Jane Eyre.”
And while that was the most absurd example I’ve seen of marginalia hurting mine and others’ reading, any marginalia has a negative effect. Little checks and brackets, while seemingly innocuous, distract the eye. Underlining obscures letters and words. But the most pernicious result of marginalia is that it adulterates mine and others’ interpretations. Put a check near a line and I’m forced to consider that line more heavily than others. Underline something and write “symbolism” next to it and now I’m looking for symbolism. Write “What are you, his mother?” and now I’m hating you instead of enjoying the book. Stop stifling my creativity. Let me soak it all in. Those little notes put me on already tracked courses of interpretation when I might be laying my own.
So erase those marks, if you make them, post-reading. Better yet, just don’t make them at all. Write relevant page numbers down on a piece of paper. It’s not that hard. You can even use the paper as a book mark. The tragedy of all of this is that the damage has already been done: thousands of books are already mutilated. We’re inheriting vandalism from generations ago. The thousand marks of bygone English students will remind me every time I take out a book that somebody else had been there before me, and thought certain lines were important, or funny. Well it’s not funny now, University graduate of 1987.
Brennan Edel is an Opinion Columnist for The Cavalier Daily. His columns run Thursdays.
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