-Satyakam Ray

Suppose you are speaking with a friend and must immediately record an address or phone number. Your search for a nearby notepad and pen is futile. No notepad is present; the only thing available at arm’s length is a newspaper. Have you ever encountered this situation?

On the first page of the newspaper, you write down the number or address in its margin. After some time, you save the address from the margin in your diary or on your mobile device. Or maybe you totally forget.

Margin notes are not limited to the address or phone number. It is also suitable for quick calculations, easy reference during study, or mental notes while solving math problems. With immediate access to smartphones, the use of margin notes has declined. However, older generations and ’90s kids can easily relate to the concept of margin notes.

Whether it is a handwritten love letter, a cryptic cipher, or a map to a gold mine, in any form, Margin Notes have always been instrumental in preserving history and have become reminders of bygone socio-cultural conditions.

Random page with notes in its margin

While cleaning old storerooms or moving to a new place, we often encounter these priceless margin notes on old books, newspapers, magazines, and more. These dusty old margins are mostly brownish from aging. The findings in these notes evoke nostalgia, prompting us to revisit our past. Some feel ecstatic when they remember the past after so many years. The long-forgotten margin notes can also lead to disappointment, a source of embarrassment for many.

Over the years, some exciting discoveries on the margins have become crucial for humankind’s sociocultural and scientific progress.

• Fermat’s Last Theorem: Pierre de Fermat was a 17th-century French lawyer and mathematician. Fermat communicated many of his theorems through casual correspondence. He made claims without supporting them, leaving them for other mathematicians to confirm decades or even centuries later. The most challenging of these has become known asFermat’s Last Theorem. Fermat famously wrote the Last Theorem by hand in the margin of a textbook, along with the comment that he had proof but could not fit it in the margin. For centuries, the mathematical world has wondered whether Fermat had a valid proof.
• Gold mine trail: John Lowery Brown was the grandson of Cherokee Chief George Lowery. The Cherokee tribe is associated with the famous gold rush trail of the 1850s in the western United States. Brown wrote a detailed account of the McNair expedition to California in 1850. He made an entry each day with a metal-tipped pen and an ink bottle. The diary was donated by Brown’s descendants to the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In this diary, on one random page, he casually left a note in the left margin about who initially found gold along the trail. He wrote,” We called this Ralston’s Creek because a man of that name found gold here.”
• Homer’s Odyssey: The epic poem was part of a collection donated to the University of Chicago Library in 2007 by a collector. Mysterious handwritten notations were identified on the margins of a page from the rare 1504 edition of Homer’s Odyssey. Italian digital humanities student Daniele Metilli and stenography and French language expert Giulia Accetta are on the verge of cracking the case.

Apart from these rare accidental findings, many more margin notes from the past are still waiting to be discovered. Cryptography encompasses mathematical and cryptographic algorithms, often illustrated in textbook margins.

In the movie A Beautiful Mind, the protagonist, John Nash, is portrayed as a genius because he can identify mathematical patterns in the numerous numbers and letters found in newspapers and sometimes on their margins.

In typical Bollywood movies, lovers exchange love messages on handwritten paper or letters, with secret instructions about where to meet and when written in the margins. Many itinerant songwriters who travel by bus or any public transportation service for inspiration write their findings in the margins of a small notebook they carry with them all the time.

In this digital age, most people use clip notes to mark specific messages or points for later review. People can even bookmark or highlight particular lines or words in the book while reading, thanks to e-readers like the Kindle. Therefore, there is hardly any chance left for any future rare paper margin note to be found some 200-300 years later.

Preserving and exploring such artifacts is of utmost importance for the benefit of history and culture, even if they are a small, illegible handwritten note in the margin. They may lead to some glorious undocumented past—who knows?