Thinking in the Margins

During our time together, I never saw Oliver annotating a book, and he never spoke about the habit; I don’t think he gave it a second thought. This was just the kind of reader he was: He would spontaneously jot down his reactions, his inner thoughts, in the margins—left, right, bottom, top—or on the endpapers or title pages, often using colored felt pens (red, green, purple, blue), sometimes switching colors on the same page. Oliver’s annotated books began piling up in tower after tower on the floor; ultimately, I found around 500 of them. I felt like I had uncovered a beautiful secret; I knew that I must be the first person (other than Oliver himself) to be reading these long-forgotten thoughts and ideas. Sometimes a book was filled with annotations, cover to cover, and sometimes just a few lines prompted him to take pen to page. To my delight, the public and scholars will be able to discover, decipher, and interpret these “secrets,” too: The New York Public Library now holds Oliver’s annotated books as a complement to its extensive Oliver Sacks archive, acquired in 2024. Bill Hayes, The American Scholar

in questo bell'articolo il partner di Oliver Sacks parla dell'abitudine di Sacks di annotare i libri a margine.