DIRK JOHNSON “Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margins” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/books/21margin.html
書物の余白への書き込み、すなわちマルナジリアの話。但し、記事のタイトルはちょっと誤解を招く。余白への書き込みは、本文へのアンダーラインや附箋を貼ることと並んで、読者が書物をカスタマイズする仕方のひとつであり、電子ブックの読者はそれをどのように行うのかというのは重要な問題ではあるけれど、記事ではそれについて殆ど言及されていない*1。勿論、面白い記事であることには変わりはない。
先ずマーク･トウェインによるWalter Besant The Pen and the Bookという書物（シカゴのNewberry Library所蔵）の余白への書き込みの話。
電子テクストについての言及はここだけ。たしかに、コレクション可能性というのはライブラリアンにとっては重要な問題ではあるな。
Like many readers, Twain was engaging in marginalia, writing comments alongside passages and sometimes giving an author a piece of his mind. It is a rich literary pastime, sometimes regarded as a tool of literary archaeology, but it has an uncertain fate in a digitalized world.“People will always find a way to annotate electronically,” said G. Thomas Tanselle, a former vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and an adjunct professor of English at Columbia University. “But there is the question of how it is going to be preserved. And that is a problem now facing collections libraries.”
さらに、マルナジリアの歴史について。20世紀に入ると、書物への書き込みは「落書き」同然と見做されるようになり、上品な人はしてはいけない行為となってゆく；
それにしても、ネルソン･マンデラによるシェークスピア『ジュリアス･シーザー』への書き込みは興味深い。
Marginalia was more common in the 1800s. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a prolific margin writer, as were William Blake and Charles Darwin. In the 20th century it mostly came to be regarded like graffiti: something polite and respectful people did not do.Paul F. Gehl, a curator at the Newberry, blamed generations of librarians and teachers for “inflicting us with the idea” that writing in books makes them “spoiled or damaged.”
But marginalia never vanished. When Nelson Mandela was imprisoned in South Africa in 1977, a copy of Shakespeare was circulated among the inmates. Mandela wrote his name next to the passage from “Julius Caesar” that reads, “Cowards die many times before their deaths.”
Studs Terkel, the oral historian, was known to admonish friends who would read his books but leave them free of markings. He told them that reading a book should not be a passive exercise, but rather a raucous conversation.
Books with markings are increasingly seen these days as more valuable, not just for a celebrity connection but also for what they reveal about the community of people associated with a work, according to Heather Jackson, a professor of English at the University of Toronto.
- 作者: シェイクスピア,福田恒存
- 出版社/メーカー: 新潮社
- 発売日: 1968/03/27
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- 作者: アルフレッド・シュッツ,佐藤嘉一
- 出版社/メーカー: 木鐸社
- 発売日: 2006/12/01
- メディア: 単行本
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