THE ANNOTATED BOOK

In his essay, The Two Races of Man, written under the pseudonym 'Elia', Charles Lamb urged that if a man were 'blessed with a moderate collection' of books and his heart overflowed to lend them 'let it be to such a one as STC - he will return them (generally anticipating the time appointed) with usury; enriched with annotations, tripling their value...'

De Quincey echoed Lamb: 'Coleridge often spoiled a book but in the course of doing so, he enriched that book with so many and so valuable notes, tossing about him, with such lavish profusion, from such cornucopia of discursive reading, and such a fusing intellect, commentaries so many-angled and so many-coloured that I have envied many a man whose luck has placed him in the way of such injuries.'

Some 8,000 notes written in the margins of books by Coleridge have been recovered from about 450 titles (nearly 700 volumes) by some 325 authors. Another 70 books that Coleridge annotated are known of, but there is no textual record of the annotations. He is also reckoned to have owned or used 650 other books.

Indeed, Coleridge was so addicted to annotation that his marginalia fill two stout printed volumes (incidentally so far only down to the letter H) with their modern editor stating that 'There is no body of marginalia - in English, or perhaps in any other language - comparable with Coleridge's in range and variety and in the sensitiveness, scope and depth of his reaction to what he was reading.' A contributor to Blackwood's Magazine as early as 1819 made the point that 'not the least valuable part of his [Coleridge's] manuscripts exists in the blank leaves and margins of books; whether his own, or those of his friends, and in books that came his way by chance.'

Southey (a pious book collector) was one of few of his friends who did not welcome Coleridge's habit: 'he spoils every decent book on which he lays his hands', he said, 'and in the next moment it is in his hands he considers it to all intents and purposes as his own, and makes no scuple of bescrawling it.'

For some time, while Coleridge evidently felt himself obliged to apologise for thus disfiguring books, he described them as 'injured' and 'bescribbled', but, gradually, the number of friends, disciples and donors increased, and Coleridge began to write marginalia on request, more and more - for Cottle, Thomas Poole, Clarkson, Lamb, George Beaumont, Crabb Robinson, Cary, his executor Joseph Henry Green, Blanco White and the Gillmans among others. And, gradually, his own descriptions of his habit warmed to 'bepenned' or 'bepencilled.'

Coleridge's marginalia are in the large part reading notes (our first variety of annotated book). These are often impromptu essays of considerable length and are more creative than mnemonics which are really short notes to prompt the memory about the book in question.. A shortish one is in The Piccolomini, owned by Dove Cottage, where Coleridge is writing about himself as the translator of Schiller's Wallenstein: 'None but a man of Thought and Feeling could have conceived the last Line and a half (with its circumstances as given in Italics); and yet, I fear, nay more, I feel - and having felt the same seven years ago; feel now with confidence, that it is too epigrammatic. Such a Tragedy should have ended with the swell of the moral Trumpet...' Others are one or more verbal explosions: 'A very vile Poem, Mister J. Godwin! take a Brother Bard's word for it!' Coleridge also placed question marks and lines in margins. He variously made his annotations as he went along, or in preparing lectures, to provide critical advice for an author or reviewer, as instruction to a person younger than himself, as memoranda to himself of his own reflections on difficult or obscure texts, to order, or as conversations with 'dear, very dear, Companions.'

Wordsworth's attitude towards books was less companionable than Coleridge's. He did have a library, although 'small and paltry' by his own description. And he did annotate a number of them, although it was De Quincey's copy of Edmund Burke he 'be-buttered (if you will allow me that coinage) when opening it with a greasy knife at high tea. Others he wrote in, for instance, a note in his copy of An Evening Walk, giving the clue that his earliest poem was published in 1787. Coleridge hungrily fell on the books Wordsworth rarely touched and ravenously annotated them: Wordsworth's copies of Cowley's Works, Donne's Sermons, Percy's Reliques and Mendelssohn's Jerusalem are among those that have his annotations in them. Occasionally, Coleridge and Wordsworth annotated the same books. On reading at 3.30 one morning a pencil note by Wordsworth on Shakespeare's sonnets in his friend's set of Anderson's British Poets, Coleridge inscribed the book to 'My sweet Hartley' (then seven years old) with a long note on the subject of pederasty.

'Much more nearly than any of Coleridge's printed works,' according to one contemporary, his marginalia give 'the style of Coleridge's conversation.' This perception was shared by Coleridge's own daughter: 'he seems ever at my ear, in his books, more especially his marginalia - speaking...in a way so natural to my feelings...and awakens such a strong echo in my mind and heart, that I seem more intimate with him now than I ever was in my life.' Coleridge considered publishing some of his own marginalia, and his children and grandchildren did publish them.

Another notable exponent of the reading note, who in fact seems to have done everything for publication, was Horace Walpole. From his days at Eton, Walpole read with a pencil or quill in his hand: 'I love nothing so much as writing notes in my books', he said, and there are marginalia in at least two-thirds of them that have been recovered. A different person from Coleridge, Walpole's reading notes were largely more pedestrian, less given to those personal flights of imagination and fancy that convert marginalia into original compositions. Walpole corrected typographical errors, filled in proper names when printed with dashes, and where his own name appeared would often add '3rd son of Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford.' He also corrected misstatements of fact (particularly in genealogical works), supplied biographical notes, and identified the sources authors had used. At his best Walpole is pithy: '...this is one of those exquisite and affecting touches of nature', he wrote, 'in which Shakespeare excelled all mankind. To criticise it is being as tasteless as Voltaire...'

Occasionally he could be amusing, as in commenting on a passage in Chesterfield's Letters. The text reads: 'I know a man of very good parts, Mr Waller, who cannot say the commonest thing without laughing; which makes those, who do not know him, take him at first for a natural fool.' Walpole's annotation is: 'Edmund Waller, a very dull Man, who was supposed to understand matters of revenue. Lord Chesterfield went to him for a fortnight at Beaconsfield to be instructed, and when He came back, said He had been beating his head against a Waller.'

The American scholar, Leftie Lewis, who virtually 'relived' Walpole, felt that the chief interest of Walpole's marginalia was 'in seeing what phrases and sentences and sentiments struck Walpole with sufficient force to compel him to stop and make a mark or write a note.' 'The marginalia', Lewis continued, 'give us the sense of Walpole himself; they awake the thoughts that flashed through his mind while he read; they make us the companions on those flights that are the greatest pleasure of reading when we pause and let our imaginations roam away in the direction given by the author.'

When I was at Sotheby's, I had the fortune on first inspecting the Levantine library of Harry Blackmer, to take down a volume of Gibbon's History of the Roman Empire, open it at a page with a marginal note, and immediately recognise Walpole's hand. The librarian produced a whole sheaf of correspondence about the annotations. No one had been able to identify the handwriting before.

It actually turned out to even more important than first appeared. The set was Gibbon's own copy with his book-label in the first volume. From Walpole's correspondence it became clear that he had sent the book itself for Gibbon to keep 'because I scribbled my remarks. I do not send them with the impertinent presumption of suggesting a hint to you, but to prove I did not grudge the trouble of going through such a book when you desired it, and to show how little struck me as any weight.'

Reader's notes are by no means a relatively modern phenomenon [18th-21st century] - many illuminated and other manuscripts of all periods as well as incunabula bear witness to this.

Archbishop Cranmer is an example from the early Tudor period. His copy of Jacques Merlin's Quatuor conciliorum generalium, 1524, provides a caution for those dabbling in annotated books. It was thought that Cranmer had signed the volume and that the annotations throughout the book were in another hand. In fact the reverse was true - all the marginal annotations were by Cranmer, but the signature 'Thomas Cantuarien', identical to those in other books he owned, had been written in by one of his secretaries, who had evidently been assigned the task of entering Cranmer's name in hundreds of his books at some time after he became Archbishop of Canterbury (1533).

Another example of a man of religion as a reading notator is Gerard Manley Hopkins, in, for example, his interleaved bible. From the date (Michelmas Term 1865) he wrote in it and the nature of his notes, it was clear that this was the bible he used from the Autumn of 1865, when he really first became aware of the conflict with Anglicanism within himself, to the time of his conversion to Catholicism in the Summer of 1866. In it he was to some extent exploring and working out the theological bases of his belief.

The Elizabethan, Gabriel Harvey - don, courtier, author, publisher's reader and civil lawyer - was a profuse annotator of his books. He also used them as repositories for fair copies of his own poems. The only autograph poem by Philip Sidney is similarly found written as a fair copy at the end of a printed book - the Poitier edition of 1557 of Jean Bouchet's Les annales d'Aquitaine. Poets who used books in a similar way include Isaac Rosenberg and Lionel Johnson. Others have used blank pages of printed books not for fair copies but actually for the first stages of the creative process in the composition of poems - Yeats, George Barker, Sassoon, Stephen Spender, to name but a few.

The usage of books for first drafts leads on to the fourth variety of annotated books - authors using one edition of a book to correct, revise, expand, extend or rewrite the text for a subsequent edition. Coleridge is again the first example. Between 1816, when Christabel was first published, and 1828, when his Poetical Works appeared, Coleridge made extensive revisions to the poem in repeated attempts to continue or 'complete' it. There are several printed copies of the various issues of 1816 containing his annotations, indeed he duplicated his unfinished revisions in successive copies. One such was a copy that Coleridge sent to the Bishop of Calcutta. It differed from other examples in some lines of the poem, and in some of the glosses, and had a prefatory note about the importance of Christabel for Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel, stating how Southey and Byron had praised it and how Hazlitt had attacked the poem even though Coleridge had treated him like a brother 'and afterwards with Mr Southey and Mr Wordsworth saved him from infamy, if not the gallows'. Many examples of similar usage can be advanced: Yeats reconsidered a poem in A Packet for Ezra Pound in this way, the revised version of which was printed in November 1930, but the unrevised version was reprinted in 1931; there are fine examples of De Quincey and Wordsworth (The White Doe of Rylestone) revising copies of the first for the second edition with both textual revisions and directions to the printer (De Quincey's annotations in a copy of The Logic of Political Economy included: 'For God's sake, unknown Compos[ito]r, do not send me to an untimely grave by forcing on me who holds in horror such unscholarly abominations etc etc...'); T.E. Lawrence used the only surviving portion of the 1922 Oxford edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom to heavily revise his text for the subscriber's edition of 1926.

One important example of a book being used by the author for a later edition is the copy of the 1523 edition of his Adagia [Adages] annotated throughout by Erasmus himself, to the extent of some 2,500 lines in his own hand. Further material was inserted by two scribes, to one of whom Erasmus presented the volume.

Many of the adages, proverbs and dicta in the book are still familiar today - 'cupboard love', 'to leave no stone unturned', 'to have one foot in the grave', 'to call a spade a spade', and 'one swallow doesn't make a summer.' In the 1536 edition Erasmus accused one of his scribes of adding an adage of his own - in the 1523 annotated copy, the adage in question is written in Erasmus's handwriting. It should be added that Erasmus did not only use this 1523 copy towards a later edition, for not all of it was used. To some degree, he seems to have also been using it as a commonplace book or storehouse.

Prior to the publication of a work, authors often receive (paper bound) proof or advance copies for last minute approval (the printer's view) or late alterations and corrections, even extensive rewriting (the author's view). It is said that Balzac never made a penny from his novels because he spent all the profits on revisions. One such advance copy was a first edition of Endymion with four corrections by Keats and an unrecorded state of the title-page with the subtitle 'A Romance' for 'A Poetical Romance' in all other recorded copies.

There is a range of annotations which are mainly of bibliographical interest, relating to the production of books. These usually occur on unbound galleys, copy-texts or sheets, but can be on earlier editions or roughly bound-up copies - they include:

* casting off-marks, used to indicate how sections of the printer's copy (often manuscript) will convert into pages in the printed edition - these are often accompanied with the names of compositors and the latters' inky-finger marks.

* proof readers' marks * binders' marks applied by the sewer while the signatures were on the sewing frame

* cancellations on books prohibited by the Catholic Church - an offending passage in Voltaire's Historia de Carlo XII, 1740, has an offending passage brushed out with ink; a copy of the Second Folio of Shakespeare's Works (1632) bears expurgation by the Church, particularly Henry VIII, which is no longer accepted as being by Shakespeare.

Many authors have used their books as quarries.

Southey sometimes worked on his books as sources for his own manuscript commonplace book, marking pages lightly with 'S' in pencil and later transferred passages thus marked into his notebook

Dr Johnson used books for the compilation of his Dictionary. He began by reading cursorily through printed books and marking with a lead pencil those passages which he wanted to use as illustrations of particular verbal usage. Underlingings indicated the word that was to be used; letters in the margin were the first letters of the underlined words; vertical lines indicated the beginnings and ends of passages Johnson wished his amanuensis (or, perhaps, a pair of them working together) to copy. Occasionally, Johnson would edit quotations be delimiting or crossing words out; lines through letters in the margin were made by the amanuensis when he had made his copy. Each scribe used his own particular stroke or combination of strokes so that it is possible to trace much of the copying done by each worker.

Although Johnson seems to have thought that his lead pencil marks could be easily erased (Boswell says that Johnson casually mentioned to him that bread crumbs could remove all pencil marks), in fact, the books were often returned to their owners 'so defaced as to be scarce worth owning, and yet, some of his friends were glad to receive them as curiosities.'

The Theatre provides a variety of annotated books: rehearsal and acting copies, prompt books and texts edited for performances.

Numerous authors make manuscript corrections to their own works when they have been printed with errors. Isaac Walton regularly wrote his name on copies of his books and made manuscript corrections to the text, as did Thomas Browne in some of his. From a prison cell in the Tower, William Davenant sent out presentation copies of his epic Gondibert - all known copies of the edition contain a series of autograph corrections to the text. One modern poet has even been known to make corrections to his books on the shelves of bookshops. Seamus Heaney invariably made one or two corrections to copies of Death of a Naturalist when inscribing them for presentation.

Inscriptions and presentation copies are among the most common annotated books (which is not to say that they are necessarily cheap). These occasions often provoke whimsy or humour in the author, with poets in the form of impromptu verse. These inscriptions are in various ways of interest to collectors, scholars, biographers (where, when and with whom the writer was) and bibliographers.

* Record of the price paid

* Date of purchase or publication or of receipt. One fine example is that most heroic preserver of ephemera - the seventeenth-century bookseller George Thomson, who collected some 22,255 books, pamphlets and single sheets issued during the English Civil War and Commonwealth, and which he bound in 2,008 volumes. Carlyle later unappreciatively called the collection 'that hideous mass of rubbish.' Thomson recorded that 'exact care hath been taken that the very day is written upon most of them that they came out.' This simple information has been of inestimable assistance to scholars.

* Author's name written out in full or expanded from printed initials (while this has rescued many authors from oblivion, such identifications have been known to be wrong)

* Library marks of all varieties (these sometimes identify collectors or libraries)

* Shelf marks (ditto)

* Library name with press mark

* Provenance, gift or source - sometimes in the hand of the giver, sometimes in the hand of the recipient (Thomson wrote on one pamphlet 'given me by Mr Milton'), sometimes in the hand of a third party

* Reading date

* Mottoes - Donne's Per Rachel ho servito, & non per Lea ('I have served Rachel [the contemplative life] not Leah [the active life]'); John Evelyn used a number of mottoes; George Sandy's was Habere eripitur habuisse nunquam ('One may be deprived of a possession but not of having possessed it')

* Imprecations - one pope wrote in a copy of the works of St, Bonaventura formerly owned by the wife of Dom Joao II King of Portugal: 'This book must not be moved under pain of papal excommunication, for it belonged to Queen Leonor.'

* Notes of completeness - usually 'c & p'

* Ownership inscriptions, by the unknown and the famous, some illegible, some cryptic or hidden away. Philip Bliss marked his books by adding his initial 'P' before signature mark 'B' and 'B' after signature mark 'P'. John Locke had very complex systems of markings for his books which included spine labels, underlining the date of publication, overlining final page numbers, placing the price on p.11, his signature inside the front cover, giving the book a press mark and writing in a paraph or secret sign at the end of the text and a page list. Sterne placed his signature in some volumes of Tristram Shandy apparently as a precaution against pirated or spurious copies.

As with presentation inscriptions, caution has to be taken to avoid forgeries and misidentifications, of which there are many, taking in Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, George Washington, Oscar Wilde, Dylan Thomas and Ian Fleming. Copies inscribed 'from the author' or 'Ex dono auctoris' are not necessarily autograph, but written in by clerks as an early form of compliment slip. The most amusing perhaps was by that notorious 'amnesiac' William Lisle Bowles, who when giving a bible to a friend inscribed it 'With the author's compliments.'

Multiple ownership inscriptions have an added attraction, often a poignancy. Gerard Manley Hopkins's copy of George Herbert's Poems was given to him by his Aunt Fanny in 1862. It was given by him on 7 September 1868 to his sister Millicent, and lastly by her to her mother in 1878. Hopkins's inscription was made on the very day he set off for his noviciate as a Jesuit priest and by his sister at the time that she became a nun in a High Anglican order.

* Signed limited edition and mechanical signings for queues at readings

Records of historical events, of which perhaps the most humble are the names and dates of birth of successive generations in family bibles, unless they happen (as exist) to record the births of Milton or Shelley. A more remarkable example is the bible of Evesham Abbey in which one of the monks, John Alcester, recorded the actual moment of the suppression of his monastery: 'And the yere of our Lorde 1539 the monastery of Evesham was suppressed by Kyng Henry the VIII. The XXXI yere of his raygne the XXX day of Januer at Evensong tyme the convent beyng in the quere at thys verse [in the Magnificat] Deposuit potentes and wold not suffur them to make an ende, Phillyp Ballard Beyng Abbot at that tyme and XXXV Relygius men at that day alyve in the seyde monastery.'

'Improving' the original, is one of the most presumptuous forms of annotated book. In one copy of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park an unknown reader reversed the author's decision to kill off Dr Grant as a result of 'three great institutionary dinners in one week.' In Charles I's copy of Shakespeare in the Library at Windsor Castle the King replaced the original with his own preferences for titles of the plays.

Cases of works being 'improved' are generally unknown to the authors and certainly not condoned by them. One who did welcome his reader's suggestions was Samuel Richardson who replied with good grace and badinage in fifty instances on her annotated volumes of Clarissa sent to him by Lady Dorothy Bradshaigh. Richardson did not in fact yield to her persuasions to alter the plot or the main characters, but he took the long exchange seriously and it is Lady Bradshaigh who is credited with suggesting to Richardson the theme of his third and last novel, Sir Charles Grandison.

Some artists and authors 'improve' books pictorially. Some of the best examples are by Max Beerbohm, who called them his 'Misleading Frontispieces'.

Perhaps the most unnatural act was the desecration or embellishment (depending on your point of view) of books from Islington and Hampstead public libraries by Joe Orton and his friend Kenneth Halliwell. They produced hilarious or vulgar (depending on your viewpoint) collages on covers and dustjackets. One of Orton's most successful paste-up illustrations was of Dame Sybil Thorndyke. Inside she was locked up in a cell as Nurse Edith Cavell. A man peeks surreptitiously through a window at her, but what he sees is Dame Sybil staring at the mammoth genitalia of a superimposed Greek torso. The caption reads: 'During the Second World War, I was working from dawn to dusk to serve the many thousands of sailors, soldiers, and airmen. American GIs came in shoals to my surgery and some had very peculiar orders for me.'

Orton also rewrote blurbs that were even more outrageous. 'When I put the plastic covers over the jackets,' he said, 'you couldn't tell that the blurbs weren't printed. I used to stand in corners after I'd smuggled the doctored books into the library and then watch the people read them. It was very funny, very interesting.' Dorothy Sayer's Lord Peter Wimsey was one of the cruellest: 'When little Betty Macdree says that she had been interfered with, her mother at first laughs [Orton wrote on the flap for Clouds of Witness]. It is only something that the kiddy had picked up off television. But when sorting through the laundry, Mrs Macdree discovers that a new pair of knickers are missing she thinks again. On being questioned, Betty bursts into tears. Mrs Macdree takes her to the police station and to everyone's surprise the little girl identifies P.C. Coolidge as her attacker. Brenda, a new recruit, denies the charge. A search is made of the Women's Police Barracks. What is found there is a seven inch phallus and a pair of knickers of the kind used by Betty. All looks black for kindly P.C. Coolidge...What can she do? This is one of the most enthralling stories ever written by Miss Sayers....It is the only one in which the murder weapon is concealed, not for reasons of fear but for reasons of decency!'

Then there are scribblement, apostils, scholia, fore-edge titles, booksellers' marks, bookplates and such unique examples as Virginia Woolf's inscription in a copy of To the Lighthouse that she gave to Vita Sackville-West: 'This is undoubtedly the best book I have ever written.' It was a blank dummy.

Annotations in books are, therefore, not just acts of vandalism. At their best annotated books are means of eavesdropping on a conversation between the author and reader. We can observe the spontaneous engagement of like or unlike minds, who though they may differ in their opinions (the more the better), share a common interest in the subject matter of the book. They can give both sides of a case in a very economical way - the commentator is not obliged to spend much of his energy summarising his opponent's views and the limitiations of space imposed by margins and endpapers encourage notations that are pithy, epigrammatic or concise. Annotated books can be both the repositories of contemporary debate or a vivid witness to the interaction and interdependence of one generation on another, of the transmission of culture.

Rowlandson's drawing of the battle of the books over the head of the slumbering reader might be adapted to take in annotated books, where the authors are in effect all alive together, doing battle, pilfering from one another, poring over each others' shoulders for inspiration, advice and disagreement. Above them all would be Coleridge - perhaps beneficially constrained by the physical limits of the margin, he comes through as less orotund or pontificating than he can sometimes in his own printed works. Not smoothed out into long periods, but responding spontaneously, as in conversation. We can watch him reading, thinking, speaking, table-talking - with the additional benefits of relative brevity and of him actually finishing what he is doing.

Roy Davids