Click the image to the right for an explanation of what that image has to do with the remarkable world of marginalia, which begins:
“In getting my books,” Edgar Allan Poe wrote in 1844, “I have always been solicitous of an ample margin; this is not so much through any love of the thing in itself, however agreeable, as for the facility it affords me of penciling in suggested thoughts, agreements, and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general.”
A certain Mr. Wallace, of literary fame, apparently had reason to write in the spaces of whatever was at hand. But that is a matter of quite trivial pursuit compared to Kerouac’s marginalia while reading Thoreau.














