Unlikely as it may sound, the study of such annotations is a recognized academic specialty, albeit an arcane one. There’s even a word for them, “marginalia,” coined by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge ...

Two women begin with motion that is rapid and unrelenting, fearlessly yielding to momentum, whirring limbs about the axis of the spine, then creating new axes and leveraging shared weight to tumble ...

This is not the way we feel about the anonymous scribblers who, in defiance of repeated injunctions and severe but unenforceable penalties, insert their observations in the margins of library books. I ...

Readers on TikTok and Instagram are making the aesthetics of reading more visible than ever with creative, and often intricate, annotations. Called marginalia, these markups can be elaborate, with ...

We all know medieval marginalia is full of some pretty sick snail fights. No one knows why, exactly, but there are hundreds of old drawings of snails in combat with knights in old manuscripts. The ...

We can trace a direct line of descent from Coleridge’s marginalia to the social-media annotators who painstakingly embellish a copy of a friend’s favourite novel as a gift. But the ancestry of those ...

The marginalia to Ben Jonson's personal copy of the 1619 Scriverius edition of Martial's epigrams display a recurring interest in the most scabrous elements of Roman satirical discourse, including ...

Readers are sharing how they write their predictions into novels, colour-code their emotional responses and even gift annotated books to friends. Is it actually fun, or just a bit like homework? There ...