No one wants to throw away books, so people pass t...  ...ions, dedications, communications out of context, marginalia , snark, spoilers, secret code, and jokes. Some te...

Charles Darwin had ten children, and at least thre...  ...orks. More than just scribbles, they are historic marginalia worthy of preservation. The drawings, made wit...

Scribes decorated medieval manuscripts with all kinds of weird thing, like rabbits, cats, Star Wars characters, and lots of snails. Snails very often appear to be doing battles with knights -or, more accurately, the knig...

Medieval depictions of cats are often pretty ugly, possibly because many are doodles by monks who were scribes, not artists. Or they were drawn or painted by an artist who didn't like cats. This particular cat seems to b...

Before the printing press, books were copied by ha...  ...have a bonus. The illustrations, decorations, and marginalia often have nothing to do with the text, and are o...  ...he reason why modern viewers are so captivated by marginalia is because we expect this era to be so conservati...  ..., humor, and mythol...