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Marginalia—Book Doodles as Works of Art
Ever look at the format of older books? After you pick up a handful, you’ll likely realize that compared to modern novels, there was a lot of white space in the margins.
This was commonplace in the days of letterpress printing, and likely a necessity of the process. But even before movable type, when books were completely transcribed, there was quite a wide margin between the end of the text and the end of the page. Interestingly enough, monks would often fill this space up too; not just with text, captions or footnotes, but also with works of art.
Marginalia’s a bit of a lost art form these days, reserved for Mad Magazine and high school textbooks, but its history is both fascinating and impressive.
Some of the first…
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