Word of the Day

Did You Know?

In the introduction to his essay titled “Marginalia,” Edgar Allan Poe wrote: “In getting my books, I have always been solicitous of an ample margin; this not so much through any love of the thing in itself, however agreeable, as for the facility it affords me of penciling suggested thoughts, agreements and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general.” At the time the essay was first published in 1844, marginalia was only a few decades old despite describing something—notes in the margin of a text—that had existed for centuries. An older word, apostille (or apostil), refers to a single annotation made in a margin, but that word is rarely used today. Even if you are not, like Poe, simply ravenous for scribbling in your own books, you likely know marginalia as a telltale sign that someone has read a particular volume before you.