The Marginal Obsession with Marginalia – The New Yorker

Along the same lines of the Instapaper notes story below, here’s a great link by @viticci. I don’t know how I haven’t come across this before. I’m fairly obsessive about writing note sin the margins of nearly everything.

Love this section…

George Steiner memorably defined an intellectual as “quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.” Its admirable pithiness aside, the quip’s popularity probably has a lot to do with its egalitarian spirit: you don’t need to be able to give a detailed account of Heidegger’s ontology or have published a monograph on Proust to gain access to the club; you just have to keep a nicely sharpened HB in your hand as you read. (I tend to slot mine behind my right ear, carpenter style; I like to think this lends a somewhat rough-and-ready aspect to my appearance as I sit reading “Middlemarch” on the bus home.)