Book Traces at Columbia University started with a short talk about the purpose of the event and the procedure for searching through the books. After seeing the slideshow of annotated books found at the University of Virginia and those found at Columbia that morning, I was excited to start looking through the stacks myself. The Butler Stacks at Columbia are the closest thing to a Hogwarts library I have ever seen: the aisles are thin and some books are so old that that small pieces of the pages sprinkle out when the book is opened.

The Book Traces coordinators told us at the beginning of the process that more people had found interesting annotations in poetry and fiction, so I sat down in the poetry section and started flipping through books. I searched through about four shelves in the course of an hour, which totaled to almost seventy books. Many of them were of works written in the 19th century, but most of the copies I found were published in the 1950s or 1960s. About a quarter of them were published during our desired period, before 1923. Of those published before 1923 I found five with some sort of annotations in them.

Ford Madox Hueffer’s The Good Soldier featured extensive annotations, mostly pencil notes in the upper corners of the pages and check marks next to parts of the text.  It had a note on the copyright page under the publication date, 1915, that said “Portions published in Blast (ed. Wyndham Lewis), 1914.”

The other book I found was a collection of poems also by Ford Madox Hueffer. This book had very few annotations, but one of the pages featured a poem with dashes and lines around the words, which I can only assume was the reader mapping out the meter of the poem as they read it. Under the poem an annotation reads “takes my heart away.”

I was surprised to see the inconsistency of the annotations in the books that I found. The poem collection, for example, was only heavily annotated on a couple of pages. Many books had scattered checkmarks throughout the pages but no written notes. The use of pencil to annotate also surprised me, but if quill pens were the primary use of ink in that time then it makes sense that pencil would be easier to use. Most of the written annotations were in cursive as well, which is far less common in writing today, even for annotating a text.

I think the best way to use the books found through Book Traces is to establish a part of the library just for books published and annotated before 1923. I know that as a student, reading and annotating are two essential parts of my education, and I would love to sift through a section of books that were all annotated a hundred or more years ago. Setting aside these gems in libraries would be an efficient way to bring attention to what we can learn from past annotations, from the way people wrote to their reading skills to their vocabulary use. Additionally, separately the original publications from newer copies of the same text is a way to preserve the books themselves. If all of the older publications are in one place, readers will know to be more careful when handling the books. Book Traces could be the start of a movement to find and preserve a history of reading through books.