the marginalia society

Members of the society read in margins. The body of the text is not, properly, the society's concern. A member acquires a book, by purchase or by gift, reads it once for the body, and then begins the long second reading, in which only the margins are attended to: what is written there, what is not, what could be. The member's own pencil is used sparingly. A page that already carries one note rarely needs a second.

Meetings are held quarterly, on the first Sunday of the third month of each season, in a room with three lamps. Each member brings a single book that has been read in the margins that quarter. The book is passed around the table; each reader looks only at the margins and may, if moved, copy one annotation into the society's commonplace book. Speech is permitted but not encouraged. The meeting ends when the kettle has been refilled three times.

The society's natural relations are with the amateur lexicographers, with whom it shares a fondness for the unrecorded; with the footnotes, with whom it disagrees about the proper place of the gloss; and with the palimpsest, with whom it does not, in general, speak. Members are admitted on the recommendation of two existing members and a single annotation, in their own hand, in a book of the society's choosing.