Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. By H. J. Jackson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Pp. viii + 324. $27.95.

No one who enjoys reading books-and not just books about books-should miss this one. It is beautifully written and deeply responsive to the wide range of annotated books that are its subject. The margins of my own copy are filled with (mostly approving) commentary and the same kind of small, three-petaled flowers with variable-length stems that Ben Jonson used to mark memorable passages in the books he owned. (Annotators are imitators, not anarchists.) If you are not already an inveterate marginator and a fan of marginated archival materials, you will be by the time you have finished Heather Jackson's book.

William W. E. Slights
University of Saskatchewan