Mathew Lyons has posted about marginalia in books.
He describes the tender surprise of finding his own late father’s marginal comments:
It was lovely to read those words and to hear that voice again, aghast, dumbfounded, appalled – alive.
He describes something no less alive – and rather more calculating- in the angry scribbles of William Blake, in a book of Joshua Reynolds:
"Blake doesn’t seem to be writing only for himself. The Reader must expect to Read in all my Remarks on these Books Nothing but Indignation and Resentment, he writes opposite the contents page for the first volume. In some places he has carefully overwritten his penciled comments in ink, preserving them for as-yet unborn readers in some time and at some place hence." — Mathew Lyons, in The Broken Compass