
Saved by Madeline
Annotate This: On Marginalia
Saved by Madeline
I also put checkmarks next to sentences or concepts that pique my interest, but a question hasn’t yet formed. Two checkmarks mean my interest is really piqued, three checkmarks mean my interest is off the charts. A star indicates this is key to the interview even if the question isn’t yet there. Two or three stars mean YES! YES! YES!
“Marginalia” refers to the marks made in the margins of a book or other document, including scribbles, comments, annotations, critiques, doodles, or illustrations.
The process became somewhat circular. Vine told me that people took their common-place books to the theatre and to church, to ‘preserve the best lines’, and writers started to self-consciously create quotable texts with common-placing readers in mind – seventeenth-century soundbites. In due course, any such truism became known as a ‘commonplace’, a
... See moreThis passage from Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From, which is discussing Darwin’s use of keeping a commonplace book (a practice I have always loved myself) as a vital part of where his most important ideas came from, just jumped off the page at me:
“The great minds of the period —Milton, Bacon, Locke were zealous believers in the memory-en
... See more