After looking through much more then 20 books, I finally found an interesting yet slightly comical example of marginalia. The book I picked up was Penrod and Sam by Booth Tarkington. The book was published in 1916 by Doubleday Page & Co, located in New York City. Penrod and Sam is actually the sequel to Tarkington’s book Penrod, written in 1914 and there is another book named Penrod Jashber written in 1929 that is the final book and completes the series. These books provide comic sketches and the stories are about an 11-year-old boy named Penrod Schofield, growing up in a pre-World War 1 United States. The second book, Penrod and Sam explores Penrod’s friends and other minor characters. There have also been film adaptions, stage performances, and parodies based on the misadventures of Penrod and his friends.

What I found interesting about the marginalia I discovered, was that it wasn’t actually a message or a note of any kind, but instead a math problem. It looks as though the owner of the book was trying to figure out the length of a side of a scalene triangle. I’m not the best at math, so I’m assuming the person who owned this book is better considering it looks like they successfully solved the problem they were given. I also found this marginalia interesting because the book is about a pre-teen and his misadventures and the math problem being solved is a geometry problem, something we learn when we are only a bit older than the boy in the story. So, I thought it was a bit ironic that a kid might have been doing homework in a book about a kid doing anything but his homework.

I couldn’t find an actual name written on the book that could tell me who the owner was, but a possible nickname “Speedy S.” was written on the page as well. This leads me to believe that the book might have been owned or was being used by a kid around the age of the protagonist in the story.