Is there a margin muse in your library book?
Marks in library books are usually moronic scrawlings or tedious displays of ego, but just occasionally you come across something fascinating

Posted by Daniel Kalder , guardian.co.uk

Checking the margins … A student in the library at Coventry University. Photograph: Graham Turner

Last year I joined the library at the University of Texas, Austin, and rediscovered a literary form I hadn't encountered much since my student days: readers' inscriptions in the margins of library books. The conventions of the genre are simple: you state something obvious in a fragmentary/declaratory style, adding a question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis according to the degree of confidence you have in your perceptions.
The classic example would be my discovery of the astonishing critical insight "Satan is the hero" inscribed alongside one of Lucifer's speeches in a secondhand copy of Paradise Lost. What motivates readers to write such unnecessary, moronic comments in the margins? My guess is that since most students are young and inexperienced, they find it reassuring to physically capture the first 'critical' comment that flops into their heads as a method of coping with the fact that they are totally out of their depth.

Thanks to UT library, I have recently made several exciting discoveries in the genre. Apocalypses by Eugen Weber is an excellent history of 2000-plus years of End of Times thinking, but reading it wouldn't have been the same experience without the sarcastic remarks about dead prophets an earlier reader had scrawled throughout the book. Next to Weber's account of 12th-century monk Joachim of Fiore's idea that history progresses through three stages towards an era of universal felicity, this acerbic critic had written: "Looks like old Joachim was full of beans!" Reading his many other crappy quips, I suspected he had checked Apocalypses out purely for the purpose of displaying his contempt for religion. If his posturing before an unseen audience of future readers had been funny, I would have forgiven him. Instead, it was a tedious display of ego, like being stuck in traffic behind a car covered in bumper stickers broadcasting the driver's views on everything from Iraq to the success of his kids at high school.

I encountered a more interesting example of margin prose in an essay by historian Pauline Moffitt Watts on Christopher Columbus's obsession with his role as harbinger of the Last Days. It's easy to find evidence of this in Columbus's later life: he edited an anthology of apocalyptic texts called The Book of Prophecies, and asked his royal sponsors to support him in a new crusade for the liberation of Jerusalem prior to Christ's imminent return. However, in order to establish that the younger Columbus also longed for the End, Watts turned to a manuscript in his personal library, which he had used while preparing his first voyage. Columbus had filled the sections on the apocalypse with comments and drawings, such as a big hand pointing at the 'seven signs' of Antichrist. Thus, by studying Columbus's notations in the margins of another man's book (and combining it with other evidence), Watts claimed to have revealed the apocalyptic bent of his mind prior to the first voyage in 1492, arguing that he had always hoped his discovery of a passage to the Indies was part of the drama of the Second Coming.

Read the rest of Danile Kalder's blog at the Guardian online.