Why Introverts Write in the Margins of Their Books (There Is a Latin Word for It)

#marginalia #annotatingbooks #fermat #introvert #books #introvertlife A slow essay for anyone who cannot open a book without a pencil in hand, and for anyone who still hears a voice saying you must never write in a book. If you are looking for an annotation system, colour-coding tips or a study hack, this is not that video. This one is about one of the oldest conversations in the history of reading, and what it says about the people who take part in it. Around 1637, a magistrate in Toulouse named Pierre de Fermat wrote a short note in the margin of an old book about numbers. He claimed a marvellous proof, and added that the margin was too narrow to contain it. It took 358 years for anyone to find one. We open the Latin word marginalia, the things written at the edges, and follow it from medieval monks and their knights fighting snails, to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose notes in other people's books now fill six volumes. We meet Poe, Mark Twain and Mortimer Adler, and a copy of Shakespeare passed from cell to cell on Robben Island and signed by Nelson Mandela. Then the research, honestly: why highlighting does less than it feels like, why writing your own words seems to help, and what thousands of forgotten library books revealed about ordinary readers. And we end in a public library in Cambridge in 1963, with a ten year old boy. THE THREE THINGS, IN SHORT 1. Write words, not just lines 2. Talk back to the author 3. Make the book your own, and leave a trace for the next reader SOURCES Pierre de Fermat's note in Diophantus, Arithmetica (published by his son in 1670) Andrew Wiles, proof of Fermat's Last Theorem (1995) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Marginalia, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (6 volumes) Charles Lamb, "The Two Races of Men", Essays of Elia (1823) Edgar Allan Poe, "Marginalia" (1844 to 1849) Mortimer Adler, "How to Mark a Book", Saturday Review (1941) The Robben Island Shakespeare, kept by Sonny Venkatrathnam John Dunlosky and colleagues, "Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques", Psychological Science in the Public Interest (2013) Norman Slamecka and Peter Graf, "The Generation Effect" (1978) Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer, "The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard", Psychological Science (2014) Book Traces project, University of Virginia (Andrew Stauffer) H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (2001) A NOTE ON THE WORD Marginalia comes from the Latin margo, an edge or a border. It means everything a reader adds at the edges of a page: notes, questions, arguments, drawings, dates and names. The word was made popular in English in the early 1800s by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, perhaps the most devoted margin writer who ever lived. TELL ME Do you write in your books? And what is the best note you have ever left, or found, in a margin? This channel makes slow essays about reading, learning and the quiet life of the mind. New ones regularly. Subscribe if that is what you are here for. #coleridge #marktwain #nelsonmandela #booklovers #reading #lifelonglearning #introvert #videoessay