“If This Book Should Chance to Roam”: The Importance of Children’s Marginalia in Rare Books Collections

Abstract

This article describes why child-created marginalia can serve as an important source within rare books in special collections librarie. Given the general lack of child-created cultural heritage within repositories at large, child-created cultural heritage rare books collections that contain children’s marginalia hold a distinctly valuable source for scholars interested in the ideas and lives of children. The authors bring awareness to the complexity of marginalia’s status overall, describe the common varieties of child-created marginalia, and provide insight into how to make these sources less elusive to researchers