Book Traces was simultaneously one of the nerdiest and most interesting events I have participated in since moving to New York, and that says a lot coming from a kid studying game design.  The goal of Book Traces is to save valuable bits of history from being interred in deep storage or burned in a heap.  These bits of history are scrawled in books, in the margins, on cover pages, or anywhere else there is blank space.  Libraries that have too many books, however are beginning to get rid of many nineteenth century works as there are many copies of them, and most are already available online.  What aren’t available online are all the notes, love letters, and tributes that fill certain editions.  Book Traces is establishing something of an army of “seekers” those of us who will dedicate a few hours to paging through volumes looking for marginalia in order to save some of these snapshots of the past.

What I find particularly interesting in the project is how insightful it is into how readers react to certain works.  One perfect example of this in action was that when we arrived in the stacks where we were to search, the librarians instructed us to focus our attention on poetry as most of the finds came from those sections.  This shows, relatively unsurprisingly, that poetry had an especially profound impact on readers during the 1800s as many of such readers were moved enough by the verses to write on the page in their hands.  It then came as no surprise to me that the lone piece of marginalia I was able to discover in the hour I spent searching was in a book of poems by Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford.

Though the book in question was printed in 1921, the date of the writing is debatable, and due to the annotation’s academic nature Andrew Stauffer, the project’s founder suggested that it might be the doing of a past professor at the university. Still, the book is an interesting addition none the less.

Moving forward I feel that scanning these books is the best possible way to save them for the future.  Not only would creating digital copies preserve the content, but the process would, and indeed already has, make them easy to share and teach from, showing just how important it is to preserve these old texts.  Were it up to me I would like for all these books, or at least the more notable ones, to be gathered in one collection, perhaps even into a museum exhibition.

Leaving the event I felt inspired. Inspired not only to pay closer attention to the words others have written, but to engage more with the material I’m reading.  I’ve always been a proponent of the physical book, but I usually hesitate to mark them up.  I now understand how valuable it could be not only to my future self should I return to that work, but to those who may page through it long after I’m gone.  Some of the ways these individuals interacted with their books is remarkable.  Far from just simply underlining key passages, many readers composed their own poems alongside printed ones, other added lines where they saw fit.  Some other past readers kept their novels or poetry collections as a sort of journal, pouring out very intimate aspects of their lives. And while I may not take my interactive reading to such a level, I will certainly reconsider how I read and interact with books.