CHICAGO - Marginalia, the custom of writing comments in books, is a rich literary pastime. But it has an uncertain fate in a digitalized world.

“People will always find a way to annotate electronically,” said G. Thomas Tanselle, a former vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and an adjunct professor of English at Columbia University in New York. “But there is the question of how it is going to be preserved. And that is a problem now facing collections libraries.”

These are the sorts of matters pondered by the Caxton Club, a literary group founded in 1895. With the Newberry Library here, it is sponsoring a symposium on March 19 that will feature a new volume of essays about association copies - books once owned or annotated by the authors . The essays touch on works that connect President Lincoln and Alexander Pope; Jane Austen and William Cowper; Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a prolific margin writer, as were William Blake and Charles Darwin. In the 20th century it mostly came to be regarded like graffiti: something that polite and respectful people did not do.

Paul F. Gehl, a curator at the Newberry, blamed generations of librarians and teachers for “inflicting us with the idea” that writing in books makes them “spoiled or damaged.”

When Nelson Mandela was imprisoned in South Africa in 1977, he wrote his name next to a passage from “Julius Caesar” that reads “Cowards die many times before their deaths.”

Studs Terkel, the oral historian, was known to admonish friends who would read his books but leave them free of markings. He told them that reading a book should not be passive , but rather a raucous conversation.

Books with markings are increasingly seen these days as more valuable, not just for a celebrity connection but also for what they reveal about the people associated with a work, said Heather Jackson, a professor of English at the University of Toronto.

She said examining marginalia reveals a pattern of emotional reactions among everyday readers that might otherwise be missed, even by literary professionals. “It might be a shepherd writing in the margins about what a book means to him as he’s out tending his flock,” Professor Jackson said.

“It might be a schoolgirl telling us how she feels.”

Not everyone values marginalia, said Paul Ruxin, a Caxton Club member.

“If you think about the traditional view that the book is only about the text,” he said, “then this is kind of foolish. ”

David Spadafora, president of the Newberry, said marginalia enriched a book, as readers infer other meanings, and lend it historical context.

“The digital revolution is a good thing for the physical object,” he said. As more people see historical artifacts in electronic form, “the more they’re going to want to encounter the real object.”


By DIRK JOHNSON