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36-464: Marginalia (or apostils ) are marks made in the margins of a book or other document. They may be scribbles, comments, glosses (annotations) , critiques , doodles , drolleries , or illuminations . Biblical manuscripts have notes in the margin, for liturgical use. Numbers of texts' divisions are given at the margin ( κεφάλαια , Ammonian Sections, Eusebian Canons ). There are some scholia , corrections and other notes usually made later by hand in

72-587: A bestseller. In 2005, the CD was re-released under a Creative Commons license, allowing free, non-commercial distribution of the recording. He also recorded two of his poems for the audio versions of Garrison Keillor 's collection Good Poems (2002). Collins has appeared on Keillor's radio show, A Prairie Home Companion , numerous times, where he gained a portion of his large following. In 2005, Collins recorded Billy Collins Live: A Performance in New York City. Collins

108-437: A blank border. With the invention of the printing press , books began to be manufactured in large numbers. As paper began to be produced in bulk, page size and shape were increasingly determined by the size and shape of mould which was most practical for producers. As pages became more standardized, so did the size and shape of margins. In general, margins in books have grown smaller over time. The wide margins common during

144-419: A cultural emissary of the U.S. State Department. In 2013 and 2015, Collins toured with the singer-songwriter Aimee Mann , performing on stage with her in a music-poetry-conversation format. Collins and Paul Simon have engaged in four onstage conversations about poetry, music, and lyrics, starting in 2008. The conversations were held in 2008 at New York's 92nd Street Y and The Winter Park Institute, in 2013 at

180-514: A good appreciation for their predecessors' distillation of knowledge. In recent years, the marginalia left behind by university students as they engage with library textbooks has also been a topic of interest to sociologists looking to understand the experience of being a university student. The former Moscow correspondent of The Financial Times , John Lloyd, has stated that he was shown Stalin 's copy of Machiavelli 's The Prince , with marginal comments. American poet Billy Collins has explored

216-452: A house. Books, therefore, were long-term investments expected to be handed down to succeeding generations. Readers commonly wrote notes in the margins of books in order to enhance the understanding of later readers. Of the 52 extant manuscript copies of Lucretius ' "De rerum natura" (On the Nature of Things) available to scholars, all but three contain marginal notes. The practice of writing in

252-639: A special joint session of the United States Congress on September 6, 2002, held to remember the victims of the 9/11 attacks . Though, unlike their British counterparts, U.S. poets laureate are not asked or expected to write occasional poetry, Collins was asked by the Librarian of Congress to write a poem especially for that event. Collins initially refused to read "The Names" in public, though he has read it two times in public since 2002. He vowed not to include it in any of his books, refusing to capitalize on

288-603: Is a founding Advisory Board member of the CUNY Institute for Irish-American Studies at Lehman College. Collins has taught and served as a visiting writer at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York as well as teaching workshops across the U.S. and in Ireland. Collins is a member of the faculty of SUNY Stony Brook Southampton , where (2015) he teaches poetry workshops. Collins was named U.S. Poet Laureate in 2001 and held

324-616: Is a teacher in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton . Collins was born in Manhattan to William and Katherine Collins and grew up in Queens and White Plains . William was born to a large family from Ireland and Katherine was from Canada. His mother, Katherine Collins, was a nurse who stopped working to raise the couple's only child. Mrs. Collins had the ability to recite verses on almost any subject, which she often did, and cultivated in her young son

360-797: Is an American poet who served as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He was a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York , retiring in 2016. Collins was recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library (1992) and selected as the New York State Poet for 2004 through 2006. In 2016, Collins was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters . As of 2020, he

396-919: The National Endowment for the Arts , the New York Foundation for the Arts and in 1993, from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation . One of his most critically acclaimed works, "Fishing on the Susquehanna in July" has been added to the preserved works of the United States Native American literary registry as being deemed a culturally significant poem. The poem has been included on national Advance Placement exams for high school students. In 2012, Collins appeared as himself in an episode of

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432-615: The PBS animated series Martha Speaks . Collins is on the editorial board at The Alaska Quarterly Review . Most recently he contributed to the 30th anniversary edition. He is on the advisory board at the Southern Review and is similarly named in other journals. During the stay-at-home confinement period necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic beginning in March 2020, Collins, like many others in

468-618: The 1800s. Fermat's claim, written around 1637, of a proof of Fermat's last theorem too big to fit in the margin is the most famous mathematical marginal note. Voltaire, in the 1700s, annotated books in his library so extensively that his annotations have been collected and published. The first recorded use of the word marginalia is in 1819 in Blackwood's Magazine . From 1845 to 1849 Edgar Allan Poe titled some of his reflections and fragmentary material "Marginalia". Five volumes of Samuel T. Coleridge 's marginalia have been published. Beginning in

504-404: The 1990s, attempts have been made to design and market e-book devices permitting a limited form of marginalia. Some famous marginalia were serious works, or drafts thereof, written in margins due to scarcity of paper. Voltaire composed in book margins while in prison, and Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a personal statement in margins just before his execution. Marginalia can add to or detract from

540-649: The 9/11 attacks. However, "The Names" was included in The Poets Laureate Anthology put out by the Library of Congress, for which Collins wrote the foreword. At the time the only book-published version of "The Names", it contained a number of typographical errors. The poem also appeared in the New York Times , September 6, 2002. Collins finally agreed to include "The Names" in his new and selected volume Aimless Love in 2013. As Poet Laureate, Collins instituted

576-747: The Chautauqua Institution, and in 2013 at Emory University as part of the Richard Ellman Lectures in Modern Literature, where Simon was the 2013 Richard Ellman Lecturer. Collins presented a TED talk, Everyday moments, caught in time at TED 2012. Collins, as one of the Favorite 100 TED speakers of all time, was invited to give another TED talk at TED 2014 in Vancouver, Canada. As U.S. Poet Laureate, Collins read his poem The Names at

612-585: The Renaissance have given way to much narrower proportions. However, there is still much variation depending on the size and purpose of the book. Computers and the Internet have revolutionized our consumption of the written word. Books can now exist without physical pages, and text can be viewed on a myriad of devices. In the early days of the Internet, the concept of margins was foreign to web browsers. However, as computer screens got bigger this became an issue for

648-617: The editor Daniel Menaker, remained the talk of the poetry world, and indeed the literary world, for quite some time. Over the years, the U.S. magazine Poetry has awarded Collins several prizes in recognition of poems they publish. During the 1990s, Collins won five such prizes. The magazine also selected him as "Poet of the Year" in 1994. In 2005 Collins was the first annual recipient of its Mark Twain Prize for Humor in Poetry. He has received fellowships from

684-417: The function of visually signaling to readers when to stop reading and move down to the next line of text. During the first three centuries BC, the scroll gradually began to be replaced by the codex . Rather than storing text on one long, continuous piece of papyrus, the codex was constructed of individual pieces of parchment , bound together on one side. Now that each page was separated physically from all

720-451: The influence of contemporary poets like Karl Shapiro , Howard Nemerov and Reed Whittemore , and during his adolescence he was influenced by Beat Generation poets as well. In 1975 Collins founded The Mid-Atlantic Review with his friends Walter Blanco and Steve Bailey. Collins is a Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College in the Bronx, where he joined the faculty in 1968. He

756-502: The left and the right. OpenOffice Writer and LibreOffice Writer have 0.79 inch (20 mm) all around. LaTeX varies the width of its margins depending on the font size. By default, LaTeX uses 1.5 inches margin sizes for 12pt documents, 1.75 inches for 11pt, and 1.875 inches for 10pt—relatively large margins. These adjustments are intended to allow a maximum of 66 characters per line , to increase readability. Billy Collins William James Collins (born March 22, 1941)

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792-689: The love of words, both written and spoken. Billy Collins' father was a worker on Wall Street who Collins attributes as an inspiration to his humor. Collins attended Archbishop Stepinac High School and received a B.A. in English from the College of the Holy Cross in 1963. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in romantic poetry from the University of California, Riverside . His professors at Riverside included Victorian scholar and poet Robert Peters . There he came under

828-520: The margin. Marginalia may also be of relevance because many ancient or medieval writers of marginalia may have had access to other relevant texts that, although they may have been widely copied at the time, have since then been lost due to wars, prosecution, or censorship. As such, they might give clues to an earlier, more widely known context of the extant form of the underlying text than is currently appreciated. For this reason, scholars of ancient texts usually try to find as many still existing manuscripts of

864-433: The margins of books gradually declined over several centuries after the invention of the printing press. Printed books gradually became much less expensive, so they were no longer regarded as long-term assets to be improved for succeeding generations. The first Gutenberg Bible was printed in the 1450s. Hand annotations occur in most surviving books through the end of the 1500s. Marginalia did not become unusual until sometime in

900-427: The margins of codices are called marginalia . Scholarly commentaries included in margins next to their source text are known as scholia . However, this was not the only purpose margins served in the codex. Even when no commentaries were added, most books continued to leave space around the text-block on all sides of each page. This marginal space served several practical purposes. Leaving blank space around text protects

936-412: The phenomenon of annotation within his poem titled "Marginalia". A study on medieval and Renaissance manuscripts where snails are depicted on marginalia shows that these illustrations are a comic relief due to the similarity between the armor of knights and the shell of snails. Margin (typography) Marks made in the margins are called marginalia . Margins are an important method of organizing

972-410: The program Poetry 180 for high schools. Collins chose 180 poems for the program and the accompanying book, Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry —one for each day of the school year. Collins edited a second anthology, 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Every Day to refresh the supply of available poems. In 1997, Collins recorded The Best Cigarette , a collection of 34 of his poems, that would become

1008-529: The readability and aesthetics of text. The invention of more sophisticated techniques such as CSS allowed designers to control the margins of their web pages and leave more white space . Although margin-less web pages do still exist, today it is generally understood that having wide enough margins to provide adequate white space around text is important to the usability and readability of digital text. In fact, margins become even more important because web content shares visual space with other elements such as

1044-445: The rest, margins became less necessary in distinguishing the beginning and end of the text-block. However, they took on a new role. Before the codex, commentaries about a text were usually recorded on separate scrolls. With the advent of the codex, margins (having been largely stripped of their original function) became extra space which could be used to incorporate commentaries next to the original text. Extra text and images included in

1080-443: The texts they are researching, because the notes scribbled in the margin might contain additional clues to the interpretation of these texts. The scholia on classical manuscripts are the earliest known form of marginalia. In Europe, before the invention of the printing press, books were copied by hand, originally onto vellum and later onto paper . Paper was expensive and vellum was much more expensive. A single book cost as much as

1116-709: The title until 2003. Collins served as Poet Laureate for the State of New York from 2004 until 2006. Collins served a stint with the Winter Park Institute in Winter Park, Florida, an affiliate of Rollins College . In 2012, Collins became Poetry Consultant for Smithsonian Magazine . During the summer of 2013 Collins guest hosted Garrison Keillor's popular daily radio broadcast, The Writer's Almanac, on NPR. Collins has been invited to read at The White House three times—in 2001, 2011, and 2014. In 2014 he traveled to Russia as

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1152-438: The typeblock by giving the reader somewhere to put his or her thumbs while holding the book. In addition, that blank space serves an important role in reading and understanding text. The exact effect of margins on legibility has been debated, but some scholars contend that without empty space to offset text, the task of reading could take more than twice as long. Finally, margins serve an aesthetic function by framing text inside

1188-414: The value of an association copy of a book, depending on the author of the marginalia and on the book. Catherine C. Marshall, doing research on the future of user interface design, has studied the phenomenon of user annotation of texts. She discovered that in several university departments, students would scour the piles of textbooks at used book dealers for consistently annotated copies. The students had

1224-457: The web browser's interface, as well as other icons and windows. Margins also play an important role in digital word-processing and can be changed using the page setup menu. The default margins for Microsoft Word from version 2007 onward have been 1 inch (25.4 mm) all around; in Word 2003, the default top and bottom margins were 1 inch (25.4 mm), but 1.25 inches (31.7 mm) were given at

1260-473: The written word, and have a long history. In ancient Egypt, writing was recorded on papyrus scrolls. Egyptian papyrus scrolls could reach up to 30 metres in length, and contained text organized in columns laid out from left to right along the scroll. Columns were referred to as pagina (or pages) and were separated by margins, so that scrolls could be unrolled horizontally, uncovering individual sections one by one. Thus, in papyrus scrolls margins performed

1296-545: Was introduced by his friend, actor Bill Murray . Collins has been called "The most popular poet in America" by the New York Times. When he moved from the University of Pittsburgh Press to Random House , the advance he received shocked the poetry world—a six-figure sum for a three-book deal, virtually unheard of in poetry. The deal secured for Collins through his literary agent, Chris Calhoun, then of Sterling Lord Literistic, with

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