Markson's Marks

When the novelist and poet David Markson died, he donated his sizable book collection to The Strand, which was, apparently, his favorite bookstore. Because he routinely mark(son)ed-up his books, a small fanbase has taken to browsing the stacks and collecting his old collection. And now, there’s a blog collecting the collections of marginalia. What’s especially interesting about Reading Markson Reading is the relative lack of revelations—most of the marginalia is pretty mundane (check-marks and the like). But given that Markson’s last five (really terrific) novels are composed precisely of facts and footnotes to authors lives, there’s a nice poetry to the fact of his own marginalia functioning as the material of biography.