№ 14 · Summer 2026
The Marginalia.
Notes from the edge of the page. The Marginalia prints the writing that happens when readers talk back — and leaves the margins wide on purpose.
Contents
- 01 The Slow Vanishing of the Second Person Somewhere between the letter and the feed, literature stopped saying you — and we stopped noticing we were no longer being addressed.
- 02 The Mud Angels of the Biblioteca In 1966 the Arno drowned a million books in Florence. The volunteers who dug them out found something in the margins that the flood could not dissolve.
- 03 Against the Topic Sentence A brief on behalf of the paragraph that refuses to announce itself — and against the five-paragraph essay's longest shadow.
- 04 Letter to a Young Copyeditor On the ethics of the small correction, the difference between a rule and a habit, and why the best editors leave fingerprints only in pencil.
- 05 The Understory What grows beneath the canopy of a text: footnotes, fungi, and the quiet economy by which readings feed each other in the dark.
From the issue
Essay 01
The Slow Vanishing of the Second Person
Somewhere between the letter and the feed, literature stopped saying you — and we stopped noticing we were no longer being addressed.
My grandmother’s letters begin, every one of them, with an accusation: You have not written. She sent them from Haifa to Rotterdam on paper so thin the ink of one side ghosted through to the other, so that reading her was always a matter of separating what she said from the shadow of what she was about to say. I was nineteen and negligent. The letters kept coming anyway, every second Thursday, each one opening with that same reproach conjugated in the second person — as if the whole point of writing were to establish, before anything else, that a you existed and could be reached.
It is a strange thing to notice, decades later, how rarely anything addresses me now. The novels on my desk speak of he and she and, lately, an ambient, weatherless they. The essays perform their thinking in a confident first person that wants witnesses, not correspondents. Even the letters that do arrive — from banks, from platforms, from the subscription I keep meaning to cancel — deploy you the way a supermarket deploys music: to move me through the aisles, not to meet me in them. The grammatical second person survives everywhere and addresses no one.
Continue reading →Letters & colophon
Re: № 13, “The Comma Wars”
You printed that the semicolon is “a comma with ambitions.” I have taught punctuation for thirty years and I want you to know I read the line aloud to an empty classroom and then sat down for a while. Renewing for two years.
Re: the margins generally
My copy of № 12 came back from a friend with her own notes crowding yours. I believe this makes her a contributor. She believes it makes her a critic. Please advise, as the book is now unreadable and much improved.
Colophon
- Set in
- Fraunces, Spectral & IBM Plex Mono
- Paper
- Munken Print Cream, 90 gsm
- Printed by
- Drukkerij Anders, Ghent · sewn, not stapled
- Circulation
- 4,120 and holding, on principle
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