Richard III, Act 1, scene 3 and I’m up to line 90. Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother (it is very confusing) is just ripping into Gloucester, the anti-hero of the play for having murdered her husband and son.
She says ‘My Lord, you do me shameful injury, Falsely to draw me in these vile suspects.’ It’s a tense part of the play and I’m trying to keep up with the plot when my eye is drawn to a feint scribble in the margin. I try to keep focussed, I try to ignore it but I cannot help it. A few lines further on, I give up and look at what is written. It is in pencil and written perpendicular to the print. It says:
‘Woodworking and women provide one easy alternative in time for Richard is [something] to court’
That can’t be right. What has woodworking got to do with the play? I mustn’t have read it correctly. I go back to the play and concentrate on the next few lines. I can’t see a reference to woodworking. The words wander about the page and have lost all meaning. I glance back at the scribble.
The writing is unruly like a man’s yet the style looks gentle as if written by a woman’s hand. I flick to the front to see if there is a clue as to who borrowed the book last. Why? No one is asked for their gender when borrowing a book but I note it was last borrowed in November 2010. Is that when the he/she scribbled in the margin? I go back to the margin but no matter how hard I look, or how much I squint my eyes I cannot make out anything more concrete.
Perhaps it says ‘Vocabulary and women provide an easy alternative. It’s time for Richard’s trip to court’. Could be but that still doesn’t seem right. It makes a little more sense than the woodworking. I press on.
The next few pages are clean but then the word ‘Nem’ is scribbled in the margin for three pages in a row. ‘Nem?’ Why Nem? I’m now torn between the real plot of the play and the new subplot of trying to discover what the margin scribbler meant. What were they up to, what were they thinking?
Act 1, scene 3 line 308 and there is another entry but this time it is much more legible. ‘Richard’s only acknowledgement of his evil etc.’ Well I can understand that but then nothing, nothing at all is written in the margin for the rest of the book.
Oh no, this is dreadful. I know what is going on in the play but what has happened to the sub-plot? What has happened to the margin scribbler? Why the initial comments and, more intriguingly, why did they stop?
Perhaps the scribbler felt guilty but then they would have made some attempt to rub out their misdeeds. Perhaps they caught and made a solemn promise never to do it again, or perhaps they too have been killed by some power crazed Lord Protector and their flesh lies rotting on Bosworth Field.
More likely they had had enough and got bored. If you’re out there please let me know why some people find it necessary to ruin other reader’s enjoyment by writing in books. There ought to be a law against it.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 
I used to photocopy pages out of textbooks (ones that I owned) rather than use highlight or write notes on the originals. One of the reasons that I very rarely use libraries to be honest – I hate opening a book up that has notes written in pencil let alone, god forbid, highlighter or ink.
A university colleague gave back some books I had lent her (soft systems methodology) and I queried why she’d given me them back so soon, and she said ‘I found them so useful I wanted to write lots of notes but I know you hate people doing that so I got my own set.’ I think I hugged her!
I love books and I love them to be pristine!
There are two things that annoy me about this. Firstly they have defaced the book but secondly they have decided what is important and this may not be true for me as a reader. A kindred spirit.