Do you write in your books?

Marginalia from the 16th and 17th centuries are being studied and digitised, to reveal ‘an unvarnished history of personal reading’. What traces of your literary past end up on other people’s pages?

Web project allows modern readers to ‘look over the shoulders’ of Renaissance scholars

Update: it turns out that some of our readers really do write in their books … If you want to see pictures as proof, head here.

What do readers’ notes in books add up to? According to a group of international scholars, a good deal: “Even when you pick up a student book in the library today, and it says ‘rubbish’, it tells you something,” said Professor Lisa Jardine, director of CELL at University College London. “What you get is what it really means for a human being to read.”

An international project is going to display the marginalia on more than 400 books from the 16th and 17th centuries, unveiling what Renaissance scholars thought and scribbled on the books they studied. A collaboration between Johns Hopkins University, the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at UCL, and the Princeton University Library, the project has received a $488,000 grant to digitally recover, transcribe, translate and catalogue annotations that will show the ways in which these scholars advised kings, ambassadors and archbishops – bringing them back to life, according to Jardine.

The academics behind this claim that there are “many parallels” between the Renaissance scholarship and the way we read in today’s digital world, and they hope this will only be the beginning and they’ll be moving on to more historical annotations. In the spirit of this cross-century exploration, the margin notes of today are worth a look, too: do you write in your books – or even volumes from the library? Do you stick to pencil out of reverence for the sacred printed page, or do you happily add your notes in ink?