Interest in book and journal marginalia grows as Google and publishers puts books and journals online
As a comment to the current weeding out of physical copies of scientific journals in many libraries around the world (because more and more older journal series are put online), Karen Reeds points out (in a recent comment on the H-SCI-TECH-MED list, #105, 2009) that there are good reasons to save the actual physical copies of books and journals with all their marginalia instead of relying on digitised copies only:
The evidence of actual use makes the marked-up copies unique and very good both for teaching and rousing public interest in the works (not to mention your library). And scholarly interest in such annotations growing
she writes and adds:
I’d urge taking a minute or two for each volume to check for signatures, marginalia, bookmarks and other indications of provenance and readers’ reactions to the works
Agree! Marginalia are sometimes more interesting than the printed text itself. But it also makes me think that such alleged scholarly interest in annotations may be growing precisely because of the progressive destruction of the paper-based literature. In other words, if Google and others had not started putting library books and journals online, and therefore induced more and more (smaller) libraries to weed out their paper copies, few scholars would be interested in such marginalia.
05 Jun 2009 Thomas
Thank you, Thomas, for taking note of my comment. I posted it to H-SCI-MED-TECH in response to Jeremy Vetter’s query about guidelines for weeding out the primary sources in science in Dickinson College library.
First, a quick correction: The listserve is H-SCI-MED-TECH@h-net.msu.edu. The URL for full posting is:
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-Sci-Med-Tech&month=0905&week=e&msg=2rkH%2B3vhCfoUhqS8XM%2BNdw and it gives links to 3 examples of the interest in marginalia.
I think the current interest in marginalia precedes Google. I know mine goes back well before a key text on the subject for historians of medieval art, which was published well before Google was invented: Michael Camille, Image on the edge: the margins of medieval art (Reaktion Books, 1992).
Several years earlier, when I was the science editor at Rutgers University Press, I had to turn down Mario di Gregorio’s edition, Charles Darwin’s Marginalia (ultimately published by Garland, 1990)–but with great regret because I knew it was an important a work of scholarship.
The impending destruction of the paper-based literature is certainly driving part of the interest in marginalia, as you suggest; but I think it’s more complex than that. I’m drawing on my own experience with early printed books in science and medicine, but I think the point applies more broadly.
When the only way to see old books was to visit rare book rooms, the most productive use of my time there was to concentrate on the text proper and transcribe as much as possible. The new availability of texts online (via Google and all the wonderful institutional/personal digitization efforts) often makes it easy for me to study the text in my own study, but makes me all the more interested in seeing how generations of readers before me responded to the work.
In turn, their annotations make me a better historian, because they make me notice aspects of the text and the physical object that I’d taken for granted or overlooked. That’s why I urged Jeremy Vetter to look out for those unique marked-up copies and keep them in the Dickinson College collection. In the age of Google, we still need rare book rooms with expert curators–and digitization efforts should not limit themselves to pristine copies!
Karen Reeds 6/14/2009
Visiting Scholar, Department of the History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania; Princeton Research Forum
Hi Karen, thanks for this enrichment of the discussion. I think we basically agree — as you say, scholarly interest in marginalia preceeds the internet, but the rapidly increasing number of online editions is a major stimulation for interest in the extra-printed content of archival and library texts.