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it's thursday january 19th 20 2023. I'm Jackson Bird today. A deep dive on marginalia. What is it? Why should you do it? And how does it reveal the more joyful side of history's most famous sad boy, Edgar Allan Poe.

All that and more in this extended love letter to writing in books.

Here's some cool stuff for your ride home.

Today, January 19th, is Edgar Allan Poe's 213th birthday.

The spooky author of such classic stories as The Telltale Heart and the Cask of a Montalado, Poe is sometimes regarded as the godfather of

detective fiction and a progenitor of science fiction. But one of his lesser-known writing projects, at least nowadays,

was an ongoing column for an assortment of publications called Marginalia. In it, Poe published

his thoughts on writing, on specific books, on certain people, and more. Sometimes he refers to

those books or people by name.

It's often difficult to parse out who or what he's referring to with modern eyes.

Although John Carl Miller, who wrote the introduction to the 1981 unabridged collection of Poe's marginalia columns,

says it's possible that even contemporary readers were occasionally unaware of who

or what Poe was referring to. His column was nonetheless quite popular, running for five years

straight across four different publications, including one of my favorite 19th century magazines

from a historical perspective, Gaudy's Ladies' book, the one which helped

popularize many American traditions like the Christmas tree and eating turkey at Thanksgiving.

But anyways, Miller says that Poe's reflections in his marginalia column were, quote,

...