Annotate This: On Marginalia

“Don’t be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes o

... See more

As yet another scholarly excerpter, the Jesuit Jeremias Drexel, put it, Notae propriae, notae optimae: ‘your own notes are the best notes’. Finally, the well-arranged common-place functioned as a kind of externalised memory, which, as historian Ann Blair notes, ‘liberated the reader from the task of memorising the selected passages’. This in turn ‘

... See more

Florilegia were compilations of excerpts from other writings, essentially mashing up selected passages and connecting dots from existing texts to illuminate a specific topic or doctrine or idea. The word comes from the Latin for “flower” and “gather.” The florilegium is commonly considered one of the earliest recorded examples of remix culture.

"Our... See more