“March 3, 1963”

My Nanny’s handwriting stared up at me from the book my Poppy had placed in my hand. I had never seen anything quite like it.

“My Johnny,

Lines of verse last a long time, but sometimes even those we love best of all, can be forgotten. But, you know, love lasts a lifetime, and even a lot longer, something called forever. With the help of God, our love will last even longer than forever.

Happy Anniversary John.

As always yours, Mary”

Ever since I can remember, I’ve loved finding writing in books. My mom and Nanny are both English teachers, so searching through the family library is like looking through a whole collection of personalized books, with notes in the margins, and lines under the words which give you the key to the tragedy of Hamlet, or a map to Watership Down. For me, there’s nothing like seeing a little smiley face in the corner of a page, my Nanny’s signature move, which tells you something either funny or heart-wrenchingly happy is about to happen. I mark up my own books too. So you can imagine my excitement when we were introduced to the Book Traces project in my DH class. Sitting in the library, I was ready to go and find that book I knew was waiting there for me. I looked up a couple of titles in the directory, but I just wanted to shuffle. I wanted to search aimlessly. That’s when you find the best stuff, right? I start pulling books off the shelves. Blue with brilliant gilded engravings, re-binded red with regular binding, green and brown and falling apart to the touch, I was loving it. Then, I happened upon it. An old copy of Hamlet with some sonnets in the back. I flipped through and found exactly what I had been looking for. A copy of Shakespeare With Notes, Glossary Etc. Volume X from 1900.

Someone desperately trying to make sense of Shakespeare (I know the feeling). But what really struck me were the obviously erased pages. It ripped a page out of my heart. Why would someone erase the notes that might help future readers? It didn’t make any sense to me…and the I realized why it hit home so hard for me. When I saw that, I saw all of my Nanny and Mother’s notes slip away. All of those notes left in a tree for Scout to find disappeared like Gatsby’s count of enchanted objects. I suddenly realized the importance of these marks in this book, the importance of any marks in any book: They are who we are. They are our reflections on the text. everyone brings something different into a story with them when they read, and this leads to different interpretations of the same text, and these notes, and all notes allow us to see the text through a different set of eyes. To experience things as others do. That is the true beauty of marginalia.

~Austin Carpentieri