Annotate This: On Marginalia

In his book A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books, John Locke similarly advised that “We extract only those Things which are Choice and Excellent, either for the Matter itself, or else the Elegancy of the Expression, and not what comes next.”

This act of textual engagement creates a rich, multivocal tapestry of interpretation and, in so doing, stitches each learner into the fabric of tradition.

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 ‘

Fetishism of famous writers, he suggested, occurs because “it’s such heavy-lifting to actually read books.”