Reader TTS

The American philosopher Bill Vallicella urges that we should not buy any book unless we have previously read it. I’d add a further suggestion: only buy it if, by purchasing it, you make it

at least second-hand. “Marginalia” is the generic term for all those intrusions into the thoughts of a writer that the reader feels they have a right to make _provided they are placed at a

distance of no more than an inch from the right hand of the main body of the original text. _These are products of human agency: the humble will use pencil; the Dawkins types, being

infallible, will prefer biro. The notation can vary but usually “!” implies a version of strong agreement with the point to your immediate left while “?” will normally suggest some form of

hesitancy. Those of you who read chess books will notice the grammar. Sometimes in these books you find, intruding into a reconstruction of a game you are playing out at home the dreaded

notation: “!?!?” which is a sort of chess geek version of “I don’t know what the f**k” is going on.” Such is the power of signs. The _history _of margin scribbling? Quite interesting. I’m

just going to mention two: one from maths and the other from serial killing. Mathematicians, when considering the margins, will refer you to Fermat and his famous “conjecture” that no three

positive integers can satisfy the equation a^n+b^n=c^n when n is a number greater than two. Fermat — clearly _lying_ — announced in the margins of his journal that he had found a proof of

this but that the margin was too compressed for him to supply it. Yeah, right. Which brings us to serial killing, and the Swanson marginalia in which the name of the elusive Jack the Ripper

was announced at precisely 0.75 inches to the right of the text, and which, had it been taken seriously at the time, might have eventually resulted in the unmasking of Jack the Ripper.

Albeit sometime later, when he was probably already inactive (as far as we are aware, he “retired” in November 1888). Don’t get me wrong. I’m not claiming that marginalia, unconditioned, can

unlock the behavioural sciences and redeploy them in the benign direction of social good. Jack the Ripper got away with it after all. But it could be one tool in the overall toolkit. There

are also metaphysical considerations in play. How often must it have happened that some poor sap has purchased a copy of Heidegger’s _Being and Time_ only to regret it within about thirty

pages? The marginalia will supply a sort of archaeology here: just at the point where he is proclaiming that “nothing noths” you notice a serious decline in the “!”and realise that the

reader has, understandably, raised the sensible white flag. We can trace that back, via margin comments, pretty much to the day he bought it (24 hours ago, having confused it with Sartre’s

book of nearly the same title — a lucky escape). And now, the ethics. Do margin comments offer a repudiation of the author, one from which they have no obvious right of reply? Are they

therefore impertinent? And is it OK ever to deface a book? In my faith the Bible is transported to and from its active place in the Mass in a spirit of absolute reverence. Does this not

suggest that the physical form of that document is transcended by the words it contains? And if that’s the case for the Word then why not for the documents which are also, ultimately,

distillations of the words of His creatures? Are books merely collections of words? Or a fusion of the immanent with the everyday? Oh, and by the way, the marginalia contain within them a

latent power of their own. Imagine your excitement when you pull that book down from the shelves of the local second-hand bookshop, the one you’ve really been looking forward to reading… you

hunker down to read it (you read it once, some years ago, but you are wiser now, so maybe it has something to say to you). The marginalia are nonsense, written by an idiot who obviously

gave up on page 60. And then, the handwriting looks horribly familiar, and you realise that this is the copy of that book that was a vindictive casualty of your divorce of a few years

before. At this point, _contra_ the advice offered in the first paragraph… you realise you’ve bought it _twice_. And the marginalia offer an unwelcome bridge to your previous, younger and

less cynical self.