Of course, the marginalia that corrected, quarrelled, and attacked—’hostile marginalia,’ as they’re called—were the most fun. In William Coleridge’s copy of ‘Joan of Arc,’ by Robert Southey, Coleridge came up with so many objections that he had to abbreviate them, as in ‘L.M., for ‘ludicrous metaphor, and N., for ‘nonsense.’ Like a censorious teacher, Coleridge wrote his comments in red ink, filling the margins and causing him to remark, ‘Mercy on us, if I go on thus I shall make the book what I suppose it never was before, red all thro’.’ As a one-word dismissal, ‘nonsense’ seemed to be the traditional term of art, yielding to its current equivalent only in about the nineteen-seventies; a 1971 copy of a modern poet’s collection of verses featured margins that yelled ‘Bullshit’ in the fevered handwriting of another modern poet. As a marginalia scribbler, Mark Twain was perhaps the most entertaining and voluminous of all, with comments that bloomed from space breaks and chapter headings and end pages, sometimes turning corners and continuing upside down. In Twain’s remarks as he made his way through ‘The Heavenly Twins,’ a now forgotten novel by Sarah Grand, you could see his good-heartedness. He tried to like it, he really did. But finally he just threw up his hands and wrote, at the end of an unusually exasperating chapter, ‘A cat could do better literature than this.’
— Ian Frazier, “Marginal,” The New Yorker
