
Annotations in very early printed books - benbreen
http://15cbooktrade.ox.ac.uk/reading-practices/
======
devindotcom
These are fun. Wish the ones they had there were explained - sometimes they're
quite funny, as with the monks complaining in the margins of the texts they
were illuminating or copying:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/03/che...](http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/03/cheeky-
complaints-monks-scribbled-in-the-margins-of-manuscripts/254868/)

Sometimes this stuff is lost because of fading ink or palimpsest-style erasure
- there are multiple efforts on to retrieve such hidden and deteriorating
items, which can sometimes yield very important things like lost manuscripts
or fragments. I wrote about it a while back, though there's much, much more to
know than what I could fit here:

[http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/multispectral-
imaging...](http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/multispectral-imaging-new-
technology-resurrects-centuries-old-texts-n395406)

