The Marginal Note

It was not the sort of book that anyone borrowed for pleasure. A Comprehensive Atlas of the Northern Counties, published in 1887 and weighing roughly as much as a small dog, had occupied the same shelf of the university library for so long that the shelf seemed to have grown around it. Tomasz had requested it for one reason only: his thesis, now in its fourth year, depended on a single disputed boundary, and the atlas was reputed to give the clearest account of it. The account, as it turned out, was indeed admirably clear. It was also, as he discovered on page 212, contested. In the margin beside the relevant paragraph, in a small and slanting pencil hand that had faded to the colour of dust, someone had written, "Nonsense. The author has never walked this road." Below it, in what looked like the same hand but a darker pencil, the same reader had added, evidently after reflection, "Or has, and chooses to forget it." Tomasz sat back in his chair. In his experience, the marginalia in library books consisted largely of underlining, exclamation marks and, in one memorable volume, the remark "Who cares?", which he had found strangely liberating. But this was something else: a stubborn, courteous argument conducted with an author who had been unable to reply for well over a century. Over the following hours, he found other notes. A correction to a spelling of a village. A small drawing of a bridge. On page 240, beside a passage describing an upland farm, the words: "My grandmother was born here. They say the spring has never failed." He read this several times. The reader had not been checking a fact; he or she had been quietly reclaiming a place from the abstraction of the printed page. It occurred to Tomasz that the disputed boundary in his thesis was a similar matter. For three years he had treated it as an academic puzzle, an assemblage of documents to be weighed against one another. It had not once crossed his mind that for someone, at some point, it had been the edge of a field. He turned to his own notes, found the paragraph in which he had dismissed a rival theory as "implausible, though not demonstrably false", and deleted the word "implausible". Then, after a pause that was longer than it needed to be, he took a soft pencil from his bag, turned back to page 212, and wrote beneath the other two comments, in letters smaller than he intended: "Agreed. Thank you." He returned the atlas at closing time. The librarian, who had seen him arrive with the despair of the thesis-writer and leave with something resembling cheerfulness, said nothing. But she watched him go, and then, because she was a person of unusual curiosity, she took the atlas from the return trolley and opened it.