On a recent Monday, Anne Garner, a librarian at the main branch of the New York Public Library, laid out some books to show. She works in the Berg Collection, where the library keeps rare books, and where the reading room is a hushed, scholars-only sanctum with long, elegant, lamp-lit wooden tables. Anne Garner’s specialty is marginalia, and she had place-marked some of her favorites for Jennifer Lam, of the library’s press office, and another visitor. Twenty books were open on the tables. Each rested on a rectangle of red or billiard-green felt, and, below the felt, lightweight wedges supported the front and back covers. The wedges are library equipment designed specifically for this purpose, and their technical name is “wedges.” More than most people, Anne Garner inhabits this exact moment in time, being young, pretty, fresh-faced, and about to have a baby. But she majored in classics in college, worked in antiquities at the Metropolitan Museum, and spends her days with books dozens or hundreds of years old, and so is also on good terms with timelessness. In the soft lamplight, the open pages of the books she had chosen glowed like a physical and visible representation of the sublime. Regarding them for a moment from a few feet away, Anne Garner averred to her visitors that she loves her job.

One of the first hand-notated books she pointed out had come from the library of the poet Ted Hughes. The book, “Ariel,” by Sylvia Plath, had long, drizzly buckskin-brown stains running down it, and in an inscription on the flyleaf Hughes identified the stains as “thatch-drip” from a house in Devon that he and Plath had lived in. Somehow the term “thatch-drip,” in his blocky, forceful handwriting, distilled the sufferings of a literary life. A few of the marginalia in the books were wordless—for example, in Jack Kerouac’s copy of “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” by Henry David Thoreau. Kerouac possessed this book but did not own it, having borrowed it from a local library in 1949 and never brought it back. On page 227, this sentence—“The traveller must be born again on the road”—was underlined in pencil, with a small, neat check mark beside it.

Of course, the marginalia that corrected, quarrelled, and attacked—“hostile marginalia,” as they’re called—were the most fun. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s copy of “Joan of Arc,” by Robert Southey,* Coleridge came up with so many objections that he had to abbreviate them, as in “L.M.,” for “ludicrous metaphor,” and “N.,” for “nonsense.” Like a censorious teacher, Coleridge wrote his comments in red ink, filling the margins and causing him to remark, “Mercy on us, if I go on thus I shall make the book what I suppose it never was before, red all thro’.” As a one-word dismissal, “nonsense” seemed to be the traditional term of art, yielding to its current equivalent only in about the nineteen-seventies; a 1971 copy of a modern poet’s collection of verses featured margins that yelled “Bullshit” in the fevered handwriting of another modern poet. As a marginalia scribbler, Mark Twain was perhaps the most entertaining and voluminous of all, with comments that bloomed from space breaks and chapter headings and end pages, sometimes turning corners and continuing upside down. In Twain’s remarks as he made his way through “The Heavenly Twins,” a now forgotten novel by Sarah Grand, you could see his good-heartedness. He tried to like it, he really did. But finally he just threw up his hands and wrote, at the end of an unusually exasperating chapter, “A cat could do better literature than this.”

Of special interest to readers of this magazine might be Vladimir Nabokov’s copy of “Fifty-five Short Stories from The New Yorker, 1940-1950.” Nabokov’s handwriting (in English) was small and fluid and precise; in books that he took exception to, such as a translation of “Madame Bovary” by Eleanor Marx Aveling, his correcting marginalia climbed all over the paragraphs like the tendrils of a strangler fig. Nabokov was also a professor of literature, and in his copy of the New Yorker anthology he gave every story a letter grade. The way he wrote each grade in the table of contents next to the story’s title carried the authority of one who expects that hearts will soar or plummet at the sight of his boldly printed capital. Many of the stories did not fare too well, and would not have got their authors into a selective university. Top marks went to Jessamyn West’s “The Mysteries of Life in an Orderly Manner” (A-) and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (A). Prof. Nabokov awarded only two stories in the anthology an A+: “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” by J. D. Salinger, and “Colette,” by Vladimir Nabokov. ♦

*Correction, August 13, 2010: “Joan of Arc” is by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, not William Coleridge, as originally stated.