The books I trust most are the ones that have been written in by someone other than me. Not defaced — annotated. A pencil check mark next to a paragraph. A single word in the margin, usually "yes" or "no" or, once, memorably, "liar."

Marginalia is a strange form because it was never meant to be read by anyone but its author, and yet it survives precisely because someone else picked up the book. It's a private thought that outlived its privacy by accident.

the annotation as second draft

A finished essay has already made its peace with its own argument. It has been revised into confidence. Marginalia hasn't — it's the moment of friction itself, preserved. The reader arguing with the page in real time, before they've decided who wins.^[1]

I used to think this made marginalia a lesser form of writing. Now I think it might be a purer one — it has no audience to perform for, which means it has nothing to prove.

reading sideways

There's a way of reading a book that isn't top to bottom but sideways — down the margin, through someone else's reactions, a whole second book running alongside the first. Library copies are the best for this. University library copies, especially, layered with decades of disagreement.

This volume is an attempt to write toward that sideways register on purpose — pieces that know they're marginal, that don't try to be the main text.