Perhaps the most important piece of marginalia ever written — revealed in Professor James Carley’s new book The Books of King Henry VIII and His Wives — appears in another of Henry’s tomes, Augustinus de Ancona’s Compendium concerning Ecclesiastical Power. When he read the book, Henry was actively scouring the scholarly texts for arguments to bolster his decision to divorce and declare himself head of the Church of England. Where Ancona had written: “To have several wives was not against nature in the ancient fathers”, Henry wrote approvingly: ergo nec in nobis (therefore neither in ours). And the rest, to coin a phrase, is history.

Many readers, thrilled or disgusted with a book, feel the overwhelming urge to reach for a pen (or, better, a pencil) to add their pennyworth in the margin: “Oh yes!” or “Oh yes???”, “Nooo”, or something earthier. Most of us, however, disciplined by school librarians and awed by the sanctity of the written word, resist the temptation. This is a shame, for marginalia once formed a vital element in literature, a way of taking part in the otherwise one-sided conversation that is reading. Books are now so cheap, and the sharing of books so widespread, that the time has surely come to restore the digressive art of marginalia. I am therefore launching today the Society for the Protection of Amateur Marginalia, or Spam.

The posthumous patron of Spam can only be Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who invented the term “marginalia” and became so notorious for writing pithy remarks and asides in books that friends and rivals would send him their own works requesting that he scribble his thoughts in them. The marginalia became more important than the text, at least in Coleridge’s estimation: in a volume belonging to fellow writer Charles Lamb, he wrote: “I will not be long here, Charles! — & gone, you will not mind my having spoiled a book in order to leave a Relic.”

In the early manuscripts, space was left for the reader to add scholarly glosses or rubrics. Later editions might even be printed with these additions, with space left for more, the literature evolving with each edition. Between the middle of the 18th and the middle of the 19th centuries, with the spread of literacy and book ownership, notes written by readers and writers in their own books and those of their friends became a central part of the literary culture, a habit encouraged by new book designs offering wider margins. Few books were immune from the craze. Thomas Hardy once annotated an entire book on billiards. Some of the best examples of marginalia have been collected by H. J. Jackson, including Mark Twain’s comment on a botched translation of Tacitus: “This book’s English is the rottenest that was ever puked upon paper.”

Marginalia blurred distinctions between writer, reader and critic. Passed from one reader to another, the margins and flypapers of some books became a sort of message board for this unique form of intellectual graffiti, with brief accolades, argumentative asides, addenda and insults. Even the greatest writers could be deflated with a sharp jab from the margins. An anonymous reader who rebelled against Samuel Johnson’s description of the weather as “gloomy, frigid and ungenial ” scrawled in exasperation: “Why can’t you say Cold like the rest of ye world?” Quite.

The growth of public libraries after 1850, with their ban on writing in books, changed all that: books became revered objects; to write in them was to violate them, and an offence to those who wanted to start reading with a clean sheet. Some fastidious arbiters of literature, such as Virginia Woolf, disdained marginalia, objecting to all the “ohs” and “wonderfuls” written by acerbic or admiring earlier readers. Yet the habit has persisted, almost guiltily. Nelson Mandela, imprisoned on Robben Island, wrote in the margins of his copy of Julius Caesar; while Nabokov, typically, complained in the margins about the quality of the translation in his edition of Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

The psychology of marginalia is hard to pin down. When we make a remark in the margins, are we addressing the author? Fellow readers? Posterity? Or are we simply talking to ourselves, the literary equivalent of shouting at the television? Coleridge regarded his own marginal musings as a form of self-interrogation: “A book I value I reason with and quarrel with, as with myself when I am reasoning.”

Whatever the reason, it is time the marginal note was rescued from Victorian disapproval and restored to its proper place in literature.

The rules of Spam are simple: no writing in library books, hardback books, illustrated books or books lent to us by people who haven’t already written in them. No writing in pen, unless you have won a Nobel prize for literature. But any and every cheap paperback should henceforth be regarded also as a notebook to be written in and then passed on.

Books have properly wide margins because you are supposed to write your thoughts in them. Newspapers, regrettably, don’t; which is why I am leaving a space at the bottom of this column.

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