On Wednesday, December 23rd Honors college students from all majors gathered in the Hollings Library Program Room to present a semester’s worth of their findings on some of the rarest materials in the world, detailing a unique experience for their friends, families and peers.
These presentations were the final project for the Fall 2025 Honors College Arts and Humanities class “The Histories and Futures of Reading”. Taught by Dr. Jeanne Britton, Curator in the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, the class focused on the history of reading, specifically how society reads and has read, through case studies of historical marginalia, or hand-written marks, in rare and historic books. The class brought together students from all majors and backgrounds, from History majors to Neurodevelopment and Interdisciplinary Studies students. No matter their background, all students in the class had the opportunity to research topics they took interest in – and that had possibly never been uncovered before.
Though this was the first semester that class has been offered, it was not the first time students have shown an interest in the marginalia found in the books held in the Rare Books Collection, according to Britton, who often teaches Honors college classes in the Irvin Department.
The idea for the class originated from a book that Britton teaches frequently: a first edition of Lyrical ballads: with a few other poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, originally printed in 1789. The book, owned by John Peace, a friend of Wordsworth, is full of marginalia that Britton had noticed but not pursued -- until one day, when these scribblings caught her students’ eyes. Suddenly they were trying to decipher the notes, wondering at the real-world scenarios and implications to which they might have alluded, or what they might mean to a modern audience reading them hundreds of years later.
“The thing that really stuck with me is how much students were, and are, interested in things like this,” says Britton.
Britton, who knew that many books in both the Rare Books and general circulating collections of University Libraries have interesting and overlooked marginalia that might never have been deciphered or analyzed before, realized that by putting these materials in students’ hands, she was giving them a new avenue of discovery. The marginalia, unique and one-of-a-kind in every iteration, provided students with a new angle to look at these materials.
“The students were excited about the act of discovery,” says Britton. “And I was excited that they might be the first person to ever study these writings in this way.”
Beyond typical classroom lessons about marginalia and Rare Books, students got the chance to work independently, searching for marginalia in works that they found interesting. Outside of the classroom, students were required to set up an appointment in the Irvin Department reading room to spend some time researching their primary resources of choice. Not only did this give them more time to become personally acquainted with the materials, it also provided them with the opportunity to learn more about scholarly research at an academic library and archive. Students were responsible for setting up research appointments and identifying items from the catalog just as they would if they were doing research on their own in a professional or academic setting.
“This is my third time taking one of Dr. Britton’s classes,” says Gracie Bellah, a senior History and Anthropology major. “I love that her classes allow us so much hands-on experience with rare books. I don’t know that any other class would have been so interdisciplinary. Together, our class leveraged our variety of backgrounds and interests to come to new conclusions about items in the Hollings and Thomas Cooper collections.”
Sarai Deese, December graduate in Interdisciplinary Studies specializing in Neurodevelopment and Family Studies, also found the idea of discovery to be compelling. Little did she know that the class would leave a lasting impact on her.
“My biggest takeaway from histories and futures of reading is spending time with small clues to go down rabbit holes at the chance of figuring out information from the past no one has found before” Deese says. “The giddiness of being the first to figure out information that has been sitting there the whole time, but no one has looked for yet, is a great feeling I will bring with me.”
Examples of books that students had the opportunity to work with were copies of Frankenstein marked and studied by generations of students, scientific journals from past centuries and even Sylvia Plath’s personally annotated copy of The Great Gatsby. In some cases students knew who owned the copy of the book, such as Plath and Peace, but in others all they had were anonymous notes from someone they could never know. Both instances provided students with not only depth of knowledge about the material, but also a connection to readers in centuries long past. Readers who read the same book they are reading now, marking it like no one would ever see it, because they didn’t think they would.
Students join a long line of readers, thinkers and scholars who have all reflected on what they were reading at any given point in their lives. Britton hopes that this class will not only link students to readers’ past, but encourage them to continue critically engaging with texts in their own futures.