How to Mark a Book

How to Mark a Book
By Mortimer J. Adler, Ph.D.
From The Saturday Review of Literature, July 6, 1941

                                                                                

         You know you have to read "between the lines" to get the most out of anything. I want to persuade you to do something equally important in the course of your reading. I want to persuade you to write between the lines. Unless you do, you are not likely to do the most efficient kind of reading. I contend, quite bluntly, that marking up a book is not an act of mutilation but of love.

       You shouldn't mark up a book which isn't yours. Librarians (or your friends) who lend you books expect you to keep them clean, and you should. . .                                                                                                       

     Why is marking up a book indispensable to reading?

• First, it keeps you awake. (And I don't mean merely conscious; I mean awake.)
• In the second place; reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The marked book is usually the thought-through book.
• Finally, writing helps you remember the thoughts you had, or the thoughts the author expressed….

                                                                                    

       You may ask, why is writing necessary? Well, the physical act of writing, with your own hand, brings words and sentences more sharply before your mind and preserves them better in your memory. To set down your reaction to important words and sentences you have read, and the questions they have raised in your mind, is to preserve those reactions and sharpen those questions . . .

                                                                                           

      The margins (top as bottom, and well as side), the end-papers, the very space between the lines, are all available. They aren't sacred. And, best of all, your marks and notes become an integral part of the book and stay there forever. You can pick up the book the following week or year, and there are all your points of agreement, disagreement, doubt, and inquiry. It's like resuming an interrupted conversation with the advantage of being able to pick up where you left off.

     And that is exactly what reading a book should be: a conversation between you and the author. . .

     Marking a book is literally an expression of differences, or agreements of opinion, with the author. There are all kinds of devices for marking a book intelligently and fruitfully.

     Here's the way I do it:

• Underlining (or highlighting): of major points, of important or forceful statements.      

 

• Vertical lines at the margin: to emphasize a statement already underlined.          

                                   

• Star, asterisk, or other doo-dad at the margin: to be used sparingly, to emphasize the ten or twenty most important statements in the book. . .

                                                                                           

• Numbers in the margin: to indicate the sequence of points the author makes in developing a single argument.

                                                                                   

 

• Numbers of other pages in the margin: to indicate where else in the book the author made points relevant to the point marked; to tie up the ideas in a book, which, though they may be separated by many pages, belong together.

 

 

• Circling or highlighting of key words or phrases.

                                                                                                                                                              

• Writing in the margin, or at the top or bottom of the page, for the sake of: recording questions (and perhaps answers) which a passage raised in your mind; reducing a complicated discussion to a simple statement; recording the sequence of major points right through the books. I use the end-papers at the back of the book to make a personal index of the author's points in the order of their appearance. The front end-papers are to me the most important. Some people reserve them for a fancy bookplate. I reserve them for fancy thinking. . .

     You may say that this business of marking books is going to slow up your reading. It probably will. That's one of the reasons for doing it. Most of us have been taken in by the notion that speed of reading is a measure of our intelligence. There is no such thing as the right speed for intelligent reading. Some things should be read quickly and effortlessly and some should be read slowly and even laboriously.

                                                                                                                                            

     The sign of intelligence in reading is the ability to read different things differently according to their worth. In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through you -- how many you can make your own.