Engaging the Text: Literary Marginalia in the Berg Collection

Marginalia are book grafitti that offer a permanent record of the life of a book, and the life of its readers. On the outskirts of the printed text, readers throughout time have offered both scholarly and not so scholarly asides--heartily concurring, objecting, ranting and raving in conversation with the printed page. The Berg Collection houses some remarkable examples of literary annotation. Among the most intriguing examples of marginalia here are Sylvia Plath's copy of The Four Quartets, Dickens's prompt copy of A Christmas Carol, Ezra Pound's emendations of The Wasteland, and Vladimir Nabokov's annotations of Kafka's Metamorphosis.