Underline, highlight, doodle: I want you to annotate my books
Don’t gloss over this post. There, I got that terrible pun out of the way. For those wondering, a gloss is a kind of annotation typically added in the margins of a book.
I have fallen in love with annotations. It started when I was reading Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, in which the medieval monks left marginalia in the books they painstakingly copied for the library in their abbey. The concept fascinated me, and when I came across Hypothesis I began to use it to annotate the PDFs in my Zotero library (using Firefox as my default PDF reader).
Later, when we named our little research-summaries website ‘apostilb’,
and I drew inspiration from the medieval practice: our apostilb gets its name from both apostil, another name for marginalia, and apostilb, an old unit of luminance. The glosses left by monks have revealed a trove of historical knowledge and interpretation for modern researchers, and we like to think that apostilb provides “marginal illuminations on science” in a similar vein. We have built-in support for Hypothesis on apostilb, and we encourage readers to leave their notes on our articles.I also link to my research presentations (which are all HTML files hosted on GitHub) through Hypothesis’s via. Anyone who comes across can leave their notes for me or other readers to peruse.
So much for electronic annotations; what about annotations in good-old made-from-a-dead-tree books? For the longest time, I felt a certain aversion to writing anything more than my name and the date of acquisition in my physical books. I didn’t want to deface them, as I saw it. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt that it would be quite enjoyable to come across a previous reader’s notes in second-hand or borrowed books. Maybe a particular paragraph resonated with them or a poem made them wistful, and they took the time to write down their responses in the margins of their book. Or maybe they drew a smiley next to a sentence or turn of phrase they particularly liked. I began to think that it might be a good thing if everyone began leaving little notes, not just in non-fiction or academic books but even in fiction ones.
I brought this up with a few friends and realised quickly that they weren’t fans of the idea, even though, at least in the case of textbooks, students favoured copies that included annotations left by previous owners. How, though, do you distinguish between books you’re allowed to annotate/“deface” and ones you should leave untouched?
A sticker on the book cover is one way to identify books that welcome readers’ annotations! Therefore, following discussions with
, I re-purposed the apostilb logo my brother designed and printed a bunch of stickers from . An apostilb sticker on any of my books is an invitation for readers to feel free to write in them. In fact, when I lend a book to friends, I now explicitly request them to leave at least one annotation in it, even if it is merely an underline.
So, if you happen to borrow one of my books and find an apostilb sticker on the cover, I would love it if you underlined, highlighted and doodled in the book or left your notes in the margins of the pages. As
told me,“Annotations are a kind of conversation that readers (strangers) can have with each other across space and time.”
Here’s to new conversations!
Note: The sticker isn’t available for purchase yet. The text on it saying “@apostilb · apostilb.github.io” is quite small, but I will edit the file so the text is more legible. I will then upload the sticker to Sticker Mule for anyone to purchase to stick on your annotation-friendly books. Meanwhile, if you want to print your own stickers at home or order some from Sticker Mule for personal use, grab this version of the file from GitHub.
