heart_in_the_margins: (Default)
heart_in_the_margins ([personal profile] heart_in_the_margins) wrote2012-11-19 08:56 pm

Other people's marginalia

The first thing you learn in buying used books is that other people's marginalia is ridiculous. Especially undergraduate marginalia.

A few cases-in-point, from my Oxford edition of the major works of Byron, which is mostly clean except for some very concentrated blue-pen marginalia around the "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte":



[apparently, it's "about great disillusionment" and Elba was a "Mediterranian (sic) Alcatraz"]




["looking back at Napoleon's reign, it wasn't that great"]

And, the one that takes the cake, an annotation of Byron's "Beppo":



[Dandy: "AKA Cavelier (sic) / technical 'Austin Powers'"]

(Unfortunately I can't just submit this post in lieu of the reading response on the first canto of Don Juan which I actually have to finish before I go to sleep tonight.)