Annotation Nation

Long, long ago, there was a different Savannah who did not like writing in her books, nor cracking their spines, nor removing their dust jackets. Were books temples and temples should not be desecrated? Were books things to collect upon her shelf? Were books a means of holding up other books on the bookcase (looking at you, Nox)?

At some point, I realized that books are not temples or collectables (though I have a sizeable collection of The Call of the Wild and War and Peace), but conversations that, in the best of circumstances, trundle us away to transcendence. Since that epiphany, I have gone from not even writing in pencil in the margins of my books to annotating them with colorful pens and my favorite sticky tabs. Annotation is an artistic endeavor: I do not just match the pens I use with the cover of the book, but I find myself shellshocked a lot these days by the beauty of what I am reading and attempting to highlight. After reading the opening of David Shulman’s Tamil: A Biography, I clutched that orange tome to my chest in awe of the living body of the Tamil language. That awe translates to a lot of books, as I am loving most of what I am reading at the moment, and that is a fine sweetness.

Annotating is like having a child with a book. The author brings her idea to the page; you supply them with affection and a little tickling of color in the margins. What results from this labor is a new dialogue, ready to push the mind as though they are the moon and we are the ocean.

My earliest attempts at annotation were far less engaged than they are not. Hesitantly, I wrote in pencil. This developed into purchasing my first sticky tabs and a pen. I underlined parts of books that I loved and put a tab in it. Over time, I started breaking up individual colors of tabs for individual ideas that I want to remember. I began to choose my pen based on the colors of the covers of the books. Now, most recently, I have secured just the right pen to begin commenting and waxing pseudo-poetic in the white spaces on the page.

My entire modus operandi involves a few tools:

First, one needs sticky tabs. These are my favorites, though I have only had luck finding them on Amazon for a painful price. The metallic tabs I generally task with capturing nonfiction. The pack of four colors are for fiction and select nonfiction that needs more classifications.

Second, these are the pens I am fond of. I purchase the highlighting pens at Michael’s. The pen that I use for the margins and other commentary comes from Uni-Ball, the Onyx model. I find that none of these pens are prone to leakage even on thin sheets of paper.

Third, a cup of tea is a necessity.

Come along, reader, as I annotate Shulman’s Tamil, Ruth H. Sanders’s The Languages and Scandinavia, and Anais Nin’s first volume of her diaries.

With Tamil, I selected an orange pen to match the cover, as well as a black pen for The Languages of Scandinavia. The metallic tabs correspond to historical notes (pink), linguistics and literature (yellow), and further research necessary (blue). Though it is not fiction, I opted to use the four-tab pack for The Diary of Anais Nin. Here, green represents personal notes (anything that benefits my own writing); pink is for character, personality, and setting/space; purple covers profound ideas; and orange applies to all compelling language, themes, and discussion. This is generally what these colors correspond to across books.

Next, the choosing of the bookmark for each book is a sacred ceremony, one almost as important as the choosing of the matching pen. This is all about aesthetics. I value beauty wherever I can find it. Because I am reading so many books at the moment, all my bookmarks are occupied and I am resorting to postcards and old hotel keys that I kept in my wallet.

See this lightly annotated page from Tamil:

It is impossible for me to ever read every book on earth, but sometimes, when I have myself curled over a page, I feel like I am coming closer to some sort of new dimension — not simply in a Flatland sense, but something deep and gray within me to stir up the etchings of my soul upon the cave of my ribs and heart.

But I still do not like removing the dust jackets.