Book Traces

Book Traces

~ Annie Swafford

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I found this marginalia in the book “Shakspere – A Critical Study of his Mind and Art” by Edward Dowden and made a submission to Book Traces. The call number at the Sojourner Truth Library is Stacks PR2976 .D6 1900. This version of the book was published in 1900, and the original was published in 1875. This was Dowden’s first book, and helped him to become widely acknowledged as a critic of Shakespearian literature.

The first image of marginalia shows that the reader underlined an entire section and wrote “IMPORTANT” in the margin, perhaps as if the reader was using this section to include in a research project or in work for a class. Perhaps the checkmarks symbolize where an important section starts off or ends. It is clear that the reader was annotating in order to keep note of certain sections of Dowden’s criticism.

The second image of marginalia shows that the reader wrote “characters are perhaps too one-dimensionally stereotypical,” presumably summing up Dowden’s criticism of Shakespearian characters. In this section, the book reads “Hence, too, the characters , while they remain individual men and women, are ideal, representative, typical” – this shows Dowden’s tendency to analyze and criticize Shakespeare’s writing and character creation. The reader is practicing the form of annotation that includes summarizing the writer’s thoughts on the margin for easy reference and understanding – something that I have personally always found helpful. His or her marginalia helped me to have an idea of what was written on the page before I even read it – and I knew nothing about this book when I first spotted the marginalia.

Overall, I felt that this was a very interesting lab and I enjoyed searching through the stacks to find interesting and unique marginalia!

Book Traces: Searching for My Past

~ Annie Swafford

“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”

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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.

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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

Book Traces

~ Annie Swafford

http://www.booktraces.org/book-submission-a-journal-of-the-plague-year/ 

 

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The book I found was “A Journal  of the Plague Year” by Daniel Defoe. The original book was written in 1722 but the version I found was from 1908. It is a fictitious historical novel about the great plague that struck London in 1665. I forgot to upload one picture to the book traces website but I posted it here. I like how you can tell from the very different handwriting and use of either pencil or red pen that these are notes from different people.

The first picture with the script handwriting (I think) says, “Cold weather change eased plague”. This is a very factual statement interpreted straight from the text on the page. This excerpt  from the book makes it sound very factual and historical, I wouldn’t know it was a fictitious story from this page.

The next picture with the red pen simply says “conflict”. After reading this page the story sounds more like a narrative, the character is talking about things he said during an argument with his brother. This excerpt also talks about Heaven and Christianity, which gives insight to how important religion was at the time.

The final picture from what I can grasp says, “Division of band(?) into parishes; church kept death records”. Once again this emphasizes the important role of religion/the division of churches into parishes was at the time. Instead of the city or state keeping record of the death toll it was the job of the church to have all that in order. This page of the book gives the readers the idea that there was a sort of correlation with the weather and the spread of the plague. The characters were worried about it being May and that the warm weather would cause the plague to spread and more people to die.

I found this lab a lot of fun and interesting, it was just challenging to find books during the right time period. I wish I had found some more insightful/personal marginalia but this was still interesting and very fact related to the text of the book.