On the flyleaf of a twentieth-century reprint of an alchemical treatise on our South Gate shelves, Aurelio Farrow wrote in his small, upright pencil: "Their 'white eagle' is calomel. Poison. Do not try this, Aurelio." It is not clear whom he was warning. He lived alone. But the note has stopped at least one reader of ours from doing something foolish, and it tells us more about how a twentieth-century pharmacist read a seventeenth-century alchemist than any essay could.
The Farrow collection came to us in 2018 with notes like that in hundreds of its books. Since then I have spent a good part of my time as a conservator protecting other people's handwriting. This essay is about why.
What readers leave behind
- Names and marks of ownership. Signatures, bookplates, stamps, prices, and dates. They tell us who owned a book, and when, and sometimes what they paid for it.
- Underlining and pointers. Lines, brackets, crosses, and the little drawn hands that early readers used to mark a passage, which bibliographers call manicules. They show what caught a reader's attention, and what did not.
- Corrections and cross-references. Errors put right, page numbers to another book, a word of Latin translated in the margin. These are the traces of study.
- Added texts. Recipes, charms, prayers, horoscopes, and remedies written on the blank leaves at the front and back. Early printed books of secrets often carry more recipes in their owners' handwriting than the printer supplied. Almanacs were sometimes bound with blank pages between the months and used as diaries.
- Verdicts. Readers have always argued with their books. A seventeenth-century owner of a book of chemical medicine might write simply that the author is not much use, and he would be the only witness we have to how that book was received.
- Censorship. In Catholic countries, books placed on the Index of forbidden books could often be kept if they were expurgated. Owners struck out offending lines, inked over the names of condemned authors, or pasted paper over whole pages, and sometimes signed and dated the work. Copies of Pico della Mirandola, of Agrippa, and of the anthologies that preserved the Hermetic fragments survive with their most interesting passages blacked out. The blacking out is itself a document.
- Erasures. Names scraped from a title page, an inscription cut away, a page torn out. Someone wanted to hide something, perhaps that they had owned the book at all. In our fields that was often a reasonable fear.
Why it matters
Most of the books in our fields survive in many copies. What makes one copy different from another is what its readers did to it. A printed grimoire tells us what a printer thought would sell. A printed grimoire with a dozen charms added in a farmer's hand, and the corners worn round by a pocket, tells us that someone used it, and how.
For the history of these traditions that difference is everything. Scholars once wrote as though the occult were a matter of ideas passed from one great author to the next. Annotated copies show us the much larger company of ordinary readers: the apothecary who tried a recipe and recorded that it failed, the schoolmaster who copied out an Agrippa he could not afford, the woman whose name appears only as an owner's signature in a book of astrology. Much of what we know about who actually read the books on our shelves comes from the margins.
Rules for keeping it
A conservator's first duty is to do no harm. These are the rules we follow, and I commend them to anyone with old books at home.
- Never erase. Pencil notes are not dirt. Do not "clean" a book with an eraser, however tidy it would look.
- Never remove a bookplate or label. If one is coming loose, keep it with the book and note where it belongs.
- Record loose papers before you move them. A letter, a pressed flower, a receipt, or a slip of notes found between the pages should be noted with the page where it was found. Then keep it in an acid-free folder beside the book, never taped in.
- Do not add sticky notes or tape. Their adhesive stays behind and stains. Mark your place with a slip of plain paper.
- Keep ink away. Read old books with a pencil in hand, not a pen.
- Photograph what matters. Notes in fading pencil, or on brittle paper, should be photographed in good light, with a ruler in the frame for scale.
- If you annotate your own books, sign and date your notes. Use a soft pencil. Write your name inside the cover. You are making evidence for someone you will never meet.
Our practice
Our catalog records annotations as part of each copy's description: whose hand, in what medium, and what kind of note, so that a reader can ask for the annotated copies of a work. Books from personal libraries carry a small label naming the collection they came from, as described in Rescuing Personal Libraries. Notes in recent books that name private persons are treated like private papers under our collection policy and are consulted at the desk.
We hold very few early printed books of the kind I have described, and we do not pretend otherwise. But the same evidence is being made every day in the margins of modern paperbacks, and in fifty years it will be just as precious. Aurelio Farrow did not think his pencil notes were historical documents. They are now.