“Typically, he used brightly coloured crayons – blue, green and red – to annotate his books but also made fainter markings with light pencils and fine-nibbed pens. While Stalin’s cursive script was a scrawl, he reserved his neatest longhand for his books.
Stalin valued books and respected their authors, even those with whom he vehemently disagreed. His habit was to mark texts that interested him and his annotations are riddled with expletives: “waffle”, “gibberish”, “nonsense”, “rubbish”, “fool”, “scumbag” and “ha ha”. But mostly Stalin read to learn and the notes he wrote were aides-memoir rather than epithets. Indeed, Stalin found much that he agreed with in the books of Trotsky and other arch enemies.
Stalin’s annotations also reveal his schematic mode of thinking. He marked the text of the pages, paragraphs and phrases that interested him by underlining or by vertical side-lines in the margin. To add structure he would number points 1, 2, 3 etc. To add emphasis he would double the lines or insert an NB in the margin. His phenomenal memory was aided by the structured character of his reading.”
The non-binary urge to read theory in the park and write on the margins with a pencil
Non-binary Stalin?!? :stalin-garrison:
Fascinating, thanks!