October 21, 2005

Scholarship on the Edge

By JENNIFER HOWARD

A U. of Toronto professor puts marginalia at the center of her work

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was hooked on it. William Blake and John Keats experimented heavily with it. Less poetic types also developed a taste for it: Horace Walpole did it all his life, as did Samuel Johnson's friend Hester Thrale Piozzi. Even naturalists and rural curates succumbed to its temptations.

The addiction? Writing in books.

Marginalia — the physical record of a reader's encounter

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