The Wit’s Guide to Marginalia

Or, snail combat

Why are the knights fighting snails? Scholars of medieval marginalia have long wondered about the persistence of armoured heroes battling gastropods on the edges of illuminated manuscripts. Who can forget the seminal 1962 paper The Snail in Gothic Marginal Warfare, which identifies 70 distinct doodles of knights vs. snails in the first quarter of the fourteenth century? As the British Library put it, “There has been much scholarly debate about the significance of these depictions of snail combat.” Are they a commentary on cowardice? A metaphor for class warfare? A literal complaint about garden pests? No one knows for sure. No one, that is, except me.

“Never doubt the courage of the French. They are the ones who discovered snails are edible.”
— Doug Larson

First, consider the motives of the scribes who illuminated these manuscripts. Gutenberg had neither invented the printing press nor filmed Three Men and a Baby, so they were stuck copying books out longhand. They hated it! And they vented in the margins! “The parchment is hairy.” “The ink is thin.” “That’s a hard page and a weary work to read it.” “Now I’ve written the whole thing: for Christ’s sake give me a drink.” These are just some of the marginal protests of medieval copyists.

“An author is a fool who, not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on boring future generations.”
― Montesquieu

Then, think of the complaints of all readers. There you are, straining your eyes and devoting hours of your finite life to the author’s ramblings, even while there’s a new season of The White Lotus you could be watching. And then they splice a comma, or fumble an argument, or dangle their prepositions right off the page. What can you do?

“Not a book to be lightly thrown aside. Should be thrown with great force.”
― Frank Dolan

Sure you can fling the book across the room, but it’s only slightly less satisfying and much less destructive to write your complaints in the margins. Meet the enemy on their turf! In her excellent newsletter issue on marginalia, note-taking expert

Jillian Hess

to clarify, she’s both an expert on the taking of notes and an expert who takes notes) identifies five types of side-page scribbles, including highlights, conversations, additions, coded symbols, and — the critical one for our purposes — arguments.

“In this paragraph all that is true is trivial, and all that is not trivial is false.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in the margins of Edmund Burke’s political writings

The great marginalians, in my book, are the ones sniping at the texts. “The droolings of an idiot,” Mark Twain scrawled in one book. “That’s when I stopped reading,” growled Marlene Dietrich on the very first page of an Anthony Burgess novel. “This man was hired to depress art,” Willam Blake wrote on the cover of a critical treatise. Literary theorists talk about how the reader is just as important as the writer, but these readers actually do something about it.

“I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote ‘Don’t be a ninny’
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.”
― Billy Collins

And so the snails! Drawn in the margins, they are avatars for the frustrated reader. The author in shining armour rules the middle of the page. From atop their mighty steed, they wrote a book, got it published, and convinced us to give them possibly money but definitely time and attention. The reading snails leave a trail of slime down the edges, chewing through the text and occasionally expelling a pungent aside, not that the author is likely to take notice. But we know! It’s a wildly lopsided fight but in the margins, the reader has a fighting chance.

Ain’t no Psalter like the Gorleston Psalter ’cause the Gorleston Psalter don’t stop. Though doesn’t psalt kill psnails?

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Would you believe that someone had the gall to mark up Shakespeare’s First Folio, the earliest collection of his plays that dates back to 1623? And that marginalian in question was none other than John Milton? And that, because of these notes, we now know that the author of Paradise Lost thought that Juliet and Romeo would have been a better name for the play? I’m not sure you want to end on a vowel, but maybe?

Anyway, a middle-aged J&R are the subject’s of February’s Riposte Card, which I’m telling you about here for the last time. Send me some money and I’ll mail it to you!

It’s drawn by the wonderful Paige Stampatori, who introduces herself thusly:

What’s your go-to item in a well-stocked stationery store?
A good pen, always!

Where do you go for inspiration and/or information?
For inspiration, my burner Instagram account where I follow a bunch of fashion designers and small creators. For information, Twitter, embarrassingly.

Is there one joke, witticism, or aphorism you live by?
Everything happens for a reason.

What’s the best thing to put on toast?
Butter, or Nutella, or one on each piece if you’re having two.

What work are you most proud of, and how can people support it?
My editorial illustration work is what I’m most proud of, and people can support it by following me on Instagram (@pagestamp) or just checking out my website once in a while.

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“There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader’s hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.”
― George Santayana

Marking up library books is a sure way to ensure your marginalia are seen, but scandalous British playwright Joe Orton went much further. He and his partner Kenneth Halliwell inserted elaborate collages into library books, pasting monkeys and cats into illustrations and adding dirty jokes wherever they could. The state came down hard on the couple, sending them to jail for six months. Naturally, the same libraries now celebrate the augmented books in special exhibitions.

Sadly, there’s no easy way for you to mark up Issue No. 295 of Get Wit Quick. Maybe print it out and email me a picture? Or just leave a comment below. The newsletter’s mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. My book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting, ripe for riposting. Tapping the ❤️ below is perhaps the digital equivalent of writing “This!?!” in the margin.