What’s your relationship to the books you love?

Do you write in them? Add post-its or sticky tabs, dog-ear the corners, underline your favorite quotes?

Marking up a book — even one you own! — can veer into controversial territory. A Guardian article on social media’s recent annotation trend even goes as far as to split readers into two camps: “those who would choose death before dog-ears, keeping their beloved volumes as pristine as possible, and those whose books bear the marks of a life well read, corners folded in on favourite pages and with snarky or swoony commentary scrawled in the margins.”

Personally, I started writing in my books in high school; I still own my heavily highlighted eleventh-grade copy of The Great Gatsby. In fact, I recently returned to it after interviewing the writer and psychoanalyst Naomi Washer about her latest book, Marginalia: An Autobiography, a memoir crafted entirely from the words she wrote in the margins of her personal library.

When I read Marginalia, I became very interested in the idea that the books you read might become a kind of self-portrait, just as a result of writing your thoughts in the margins. It was easy enough to revisit my own high school self in the margins of my personal Gatsby and Wuthering Heights, but Naomi’s book sparked my curiosity about the selves that other readers might hide away in their own books. And that gave me an idea — what if I went looking for marginalia in the wild?

And so, a few weeks ago, I paid a visit to a favorite secondhand bookstore. The search was a bit daunting at first — the majority of books are not, in fact, written in — but as the afternoon went on I started to notice certain signs that increased my odds of finding marginalia between a book’s covers, such as:

• post-its peeking out of the pages = active reader

• banned books = often assigned in classrooms

• multiple copies = potential local book club selection

I’m so enamored with this concept of marginalia as its own form — the idea that a published book isn’t an endpoint at all, but rather a canvas or a prompt for the reader to continue the author’s thinking and creating. The narrative doesn’t conclude — it just changes shape a bit, keeps evolving through the words and thoughts and feelings of those who read it.

Below I’ve shared some of what I found over the course of that afternoon visit. (And if you have trouble reading anyone’s handwriting, my attempt at transcription is in the alt text!)

And last but not least… Dennis.

I’ll probably have to do a separate Microfascination at some point about literary ephemera: all the different bookmarks and slips of paper and other found objects that turn up in and around books.

I wanted to keep today’s focus mostly on marginalia, but this lone envelope I found was just so poignant:

I peeked inside — as it’d been long ago torn open — and the only thing within was a single index card. Perfectly blank.

Happy birthday, Dennis.

Bonus Rabbit Holes!

• Apparently I’m a big fan of writing, collecting, and noticing within certain time constraints. Check out past Microfascinations created over the course of an hour spent people-watching at the library, one afternoon at an art museum, a week listening to every Emily Dickinson poem, and the runtime of a new Pearl Jam album played for an audience in a pitch-black movie theater.

• If your marginalia curiosity is piqued, Naomi’s book and newsletter are wonderful. She also hosts a podcast called Reading Around the Margins in which she interviews people about their relationships to reading, marginalia, and books as objects. (The van Gogh episode was a fun listen during my Impressionist deep dive earlier this year!)

• This marginalia game prompts you through your own creation of a story within a story. I love the idea of using this game to change and deepen your relationship with a favorite book!

• S. by Doug Dorst & JJ Abrams is sort of a novel about a guy with amnesia, but a second story unfolds in the book’s margins as you follow the handwritten conversation between two students. Part mystery, part love story, part puzzle, lots of intrigue. (Try to get a new copy, if you can, because there’s all kinds of mysterious ephemera tucked into the pages as well!)

• In our interview, Naomi mentions writing her marginalia on index cards so that she could “physically move them around, rearrange them, throw them up in the air, throw them on the floor, and put them up on the wall.” This struck me as a useful exercise when you’re stuck with a particular piece of writing, or maybe need a new perspective. (Maybe Dennis liked to do this, too.)

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Big thanks to those of y’all who joined me for September’s zine workshop; it meant a lot to me to be able to cultivate a creative space for my community! Looking forward to more of that in the future.

And in publication news, I wrote about my beloved Dead Poets Society this month for Bright Wall/Dark Room! Grateful for the chance to explore everything Keating taught me about writing, art, and life.

See y’all again in October!