Marginalia

Of the 52 extant manuscript copies of Lucretius' "De rerum natura" (On the Nature of Things) available to scholars, all but three contain marginal notes.

[1] The practice of writing in the margins of books gradually declined over several centuries after the invention of the printing press.

Printed books gradually became much less expensive, so they were no longer regarded as long-term assets to be improved for succeeding generations.

Beginning in the 1990s, attempts have been made to design and market e-book devices permitting a limited form of marginalia.

Some famous marginalia were serious works, or drafts thereof, written in margins due to scarcity of paper.

She discovered that in several university departments, students would scour the piles of textbooks at used book dealers for consistently annotated copies.

[10][11] The former Moscow correspondent of The Financial Times, John Lloyd, has stated that he was shown Stalin's copy of Machiavelli's The Prince, with marginal comments.