What are the best (worst?) annotations you've discovered in books?

ii) In Stevenage Library all through the 1980s the town's Trotskyite tendency would annote books about ANYTHING with comments like "and you, you pitiful lapdog, will be first against the wall when the revolution comes."

iii) Yesterday, leafing through a friend's copy of Deleuze and Guattari's 'Nomadology', on one of the final pages: "this is USELESS to me - I am a NOVELIST".

obviously an english lit student. I borrowed A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch from someone at work and found the paragraphs he had marked greatly increased how much I liked him and felt in sympathy with him. Which made me happy.

My girlfirend read Howards End for A-level and wrote "umbrella symbolises insecurity" in the margin.

when my grandmother died last fall, I inherited many of her books. she underlined a great deal all through her reading life and wrote comments in the margins. reading through the notes she wrote in her collection of novels, history, and art, I'm learning more about her now than I knew when she was alive. none of her annotations are critical of the reader or the subject. also none of them seem to connect ideas like some people's annotations do (e.g. "aha!" or "she sounds just like smith here" etc). they are mostly questions. I think back about all my visits to her house, where we had the most polite conversation and I tried to be a perfect, untroubled granddaughter. little did I know that surrounding us all those years of talk were bookshelves stuffed with questions.

the collection I received from her includes all of her cookbooks, which are annotated in a different way but also intimate. from her notes inside the covers of these books I have learned about her parties, her husband, her insecurities, and the fact that her quest, unresolved even after 97 years, was the perfect recipe for cornbread. I wonder about the day that she had a perfect taste of cornbread, a taste she would never be able to capture again in her own kitchen. who was she with? where? when?

Cookbooks and family recipes are so amazing and idiosyncratic - I hope I'll be handing down crumb-filled and grease-stained collections to my own kids and grandkids and maybe further. Although since it's my other half who's the real cook, I might be both literally and figuratively marginal...

that was quick!

This made me giggle a lot for some reason.

Inscription found in a copy of E.E. Cumming's The
Enormous Room:

5 March 1963,

Dearest Bootsie,

I hope that you will love some of the people in this
book as much as I did. And maybe cry a little, too.
And that you will be happy that you have read it, and
it is yours.

Love from,
Ellsie

(ha, looking up the spelling i found some pictures and Brocks were based in Hemel Hempstead which is where i bought the book. http://www.cyber-heritage.co.uk/eclipse/twone.jpg )

I wish I had more sense
Of humour, sometimes
Keeping the sadness at bay
Throwing the lightness on
These things
Laughing it all away....
(Joni Mitchell: "People's Parties")
To Stephen,
    with love, thanks & apologies
            Love,
              Claire / Xx ..  . .

bye

In a copy of The Iron Man by Ted Hughes, written in separate pages in red pen vertically upwards next to the gutters:

WWF vs. WCW and ECW. Bras + Panties Match Up at "Invasion"
(Bras spelt Bra?^es (fourth letter scribbled out, with e written above))

HARDCORe Mat^ch Jeff hardy (?) VS Bok Van dam. Winner Bod Van Dam

Tag Math Check Columbo shaun stasjock (?) Vs APA. winers APa. Farooq and Bradshaw