Tag: active reading

With the school year starting and a new slew of books to be purchased and read, I’ve been looking for books, particularly popular “classics” or “great books” that are published either with larger margins or even interleaved copies (books in which every other page is blank and meant for writing extensive notes).

Within the bible publishing space (and especially for study bibles), these features seem a lot more common as people want to write more significant marginalia or even full pages of text against or opposite of what they’re reading within the book itself. Given the encouragement many teachers give for students to actively annotate their books for class discussions as well as people commonly doing this, why isn’t it more common for them to recommend or require texts with ample margins?

Almost all of the published mass market paperbacks I see of series like Penguin Classics or Signet classics have the smallest possible margins and no interlinear space for writing notes directly in books. Often hard covers will have slightly larger margins, but generally most publishers are putting 1/2 inch or 3/4″ margins on their classics series (Penguin Classics, Everyman Library, Signet (a paltry 1/4 inch usually), Library of America, Norton Classics, Wordsworth Classics, Dover, etc.)

For those wanting ample margins for active “reading with a pen in hand” are there any publishers that do a great job of wider margins on classics? Which publishers or editions do others like or recommend for this sort of reading?

Are there any book sales platforms that actually list the size of margins of their books? (I never seen one myself.)

What can consumers do to encourage publishers to change these practices?

I’ve seen only a few select titles from very few publishers that do things like this. Examples include:

• Gladius Books’ Huckleberry Finn
• Annotate Books’ Marcus Aurelius, which has 1.8″ lined margins
• The Folio Society has slightly better margins on their texts, but they’re generally larger hardcover collectors’ editions that are dramatically more expensive than is practicable for students on a budget. ($80+ versus $5-10)

If I can’t find anything useful, I’m tempted to self-publish custom versions of wide margin or interleaved books otherwise. Something in the inch to inch and a half margin size for commonly used texts in literature classes should be much more commonplace.