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Marginalia is the general term for notes, scribbles, doodles and editorial comments made in the margin of a book. Marginalia can add or detract from the value of a book, depending on the book and the author of the marginalia. Marginalia in a Winston Churchill book by Tony Blair, for example, would add value; a student's notes in the margin of a Penguin edition of Oliver Twist would generally not. The scholia on classical manuscripts are the earliest known form of marginalia.

The term was coined by Samuel T. Coleridge who did extensive in margin notes in almost all the books that he read. Five volumes have been published of just his marginalia. Marginalia is not to be confused with reader's signs, marks (e.g. stars, crosses, fists) or doodles in books. It is also used to describe drawings and flourishes in medieval illumintated manuscripts.

There are notable exceptions in such fields as used textbooks. Scientists doing research on the future of the user interface have often studied the phenomenon of user annotation of texts. Looking at the impact of annotations on subsequent users of textbooks found at used book dealers, they discovered that in several university departments' knowledgeable students would scour the piles for consistently annotated textbooks. The students had a good appreciation for the distillation of knowledge done by their predecessors.

In the last decade of the 20th century many attempts were made to design and market e-book devices permitting a limited form of marginalia. At the beginning of the new millennium the Sony Librie EBR-1000EP was introduced with a tiny but full qwerty keyboard below the display, to permit the creation of marginalia and bookmarks.

History's most famous marginal note is probably Fermat's last theorem.

While marginalia often refers to notes written more or less off-handedly, a more formal, sometimes standardized way of adding descriptive notes to a document is called annotation.

The term is also used by contemporay scholars to refer to the outcasts in a medieval society, such as lepers, prostitutes, Jews and other oppressed groups of individuals. This is because these groups of people were forced to live in the margins of society, or outside of town.

• Cambridge University Library marginalia pages

• Jackson, H. J. Marginalia: Readers writing in Books, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-300-08816-7 N.B: one of the first books on this subject
• Coleridge, S. T. Marginalia, Ed. George Walley and H. J. Jackson. The Collected works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 12. Bolligen Series 75. 5 vols. Princeton University Press, 1980-.
• Alston, R. C. Books with Manuscript: A short title catalogue of Books with Manuscript Notes in the British Library. London: British Library, 1994.