To underline is to draw a line under a word, phrase or sentence to give emphasis. Underlining feels like ‘snapping fingers’ at a combination of words that feels just right. Sometimes I feel apprehensive about underlining because of the way it might only represent my initial comprehension of something, which makes it a bit exhilarating to sketch a line on a clean page.[1] When reading, I often feel an impulse to underline certain things: a reference to return to, a perfectly-worded sentence, or something that relates to what I’ve been thinking about. Underlines are usually private, concealed within pages and hidden amongst shelves. As writer Aveek Sen puts it, ‘the invisible is what lies closest to the person, and hence to personhood.’[2]
Underlining was developed for typewriters which had no bold or italic type. To produce an underscored word, the word was typed, the typewriter carriage was moved back to the beginning of the word, and then over-typed with the underscore character. In typesetting, underlining is a convention traditionally used on manuscripts as an instruction to italicise the text.[3]
Underlining can transform personal musings into public statements, rendering private reflections visible. In Marking the Dispossessed (2015), Danielle Aubert surveys what readers find important or notable. While Honoré de Balzac’s extensive annotations in the Eugénie Grandet (1833) manuscript underline the intricate process of editing, Marcel Cohen’s Autoportrait en lecteur (2017) exemplifies an alternate biography through working with existing linguistic material.
Marking the Dispossessed by Aubert compiles hundreds of isolated readers’ marks found in a collection of used copies of Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 anarchist science-fiction novel, The Dispossessed. Aubert scanned the books, and made a version of it with the text removed, leaving behind the annotations and marginalia only. To mark in a book is to signal ownership and possession, or ‘to remember, to ingrain.’[4] She explains that assembling readers’ marks was a survey to see if any patterns might emerge, which simultaneously became ‘an exercise in trying to spend more time with The Dispossessed.’[5] The result is that ‘some passages get a lot of attention and others don’t, but just as often, a lone reader found something interesting to mark and no one joined them.’[6] Their interest may be academic, a mark for future reference or, in some cases, a conversation with the text; not to Le Guin, but to Shevek, the protagonist: ‘I'm going to vomit’ or ‘Sounds like me and my friends.’[7] Marking the Dispossessed demonstrates the lived experience of a book overtime: a way of experiencing a text without the text.
On the other hand, Honoré de Balzac’s notable Eugénie Grandet manuscript, filled with his own handwritten edits, became one of American librarian Belle Greene’s most prized acquisitions. Classified as an ‘extraordinary piece of literary history,’ this manuscript has small pieces of paper containing additional edits intricately attached to one extensively marked-up page at the centre of the document.[8] When Greene acquired the manuscript in 1925, she stated, ‘from the point of view of rarity alone, it is the most important autograph manuscript acquired by the Library during the twenty years of my connection with it. No other Balzac manuscript has ever come to America.’[9] This remarkable piece comprises 114 handwritten pages alongside forty-one pages of tortuous mass revisions, deletions and insertions. As shown in the image, the ‘furious explosion of interventions’ demonstrates an intense engagement and commitment to the text.[10] Balzac’s dense annotations offer a tangible glimpse into a messy yet meticulous editing process, an insight often lost in digital writing.
French writer Marcel Cohen, in his book Autoportrait en lecteur (Self-portrait as a reader), marks the ‘withdrawal of the author’ where he composes solely from pre-existing written material.[11] Cohen’s ‘self-portrait’ is meticulously compiled from quotes he collected over a lifetime of reading. This approach of drawing inspiration externally from ‘books, overheard remarks, from the rumors’ effectively allows for expression without writing a single original sentence.[12] Accessing this French text was challenging, as its surrounding sources are not widely translated into English. I therefore used Google Translate to access a French interview, acknowledging that this method necessarily provides an approximate reading. The book’s five chapters explore existential questions, including the trauma of twentieth century conflicts, the necessity of expression, and form as an ethical imperative. Each chapter is rigorously sourced with notes restoring the origin of every quotation, making Autoportrait en lecteur an alternative biography where, as Cohen observes, ‘[t]he writers in whom we most recognise ourselves are equivalent to encounters.’[13]
Looking through the bank of my own collection of underlines, I began to sort and compile the sentences under different themes: on being, on walking, on writing, on making, a way of collaging with existing sentences like found poetry.
on being
mostly I seek the promiscuous feeling of being alive [14]
quiet days, not seeing people, feeling fine[15]
I am happy with my solitude, punctuated by close friends[16]
one is lucky to find people to persist with[17]
on walking
sometimes part of a book simply gets up and walks away[18]
...take pleasurable walks through the field of the studium [19]
words lead to other words and down the garden path...[20]
you make the path boldly and follow it fearfully. you go where the path leads. at the end of the path, you find a box canyon. you hammer out reports, dispatch bulletins[21]
on writing
I was doing very little writing those days because I was in a state of permanent discovery: a whole new world was being opened day after day, and that included the discovery of Nature as a force, a haunting beauty, a matter of daylight dreaming, an obsession[22]
write about winter in the summer[23]
write the words trapped between your teeth[24]
on making
… to make work that is non-singular in its identity, that is contingent, present tense; materials and means that rest upon each other [25]
...distribution, exchange and consumption (are) inseparable from production…[26]
Moss sought to control her environment, her home and studio, creating an outward expression of her mind, and an extension of her practice [27]
… it was very meticulous…[28]
graphic design is all about considering ridiculous details [29]
… when you don’t compartmentalise, it’s all porous [30]
plasticity is important to me [31]
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[1]Personal correspondence with S.Ellory, 24 October 2024.
[2] Aveek Sen, Pocket Book, Stolon Press, Sydney, 2021, p. 6.
[3] Ilene Strizver, Type Rules! The Designer's Guide To Professional Typography, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey, 2006, p. 89.
Millersville University, ‘Italics, Quotation Marks, Underscore’, Grammar and Punctuation, 31 July 2014, https://blogs.millersville.edu/bduncan/italics-quotation-marks-underscore/ (accessed 13 September 2025).
[4] Danielle Aubert, Marking the Dispossessed, 2015, https://www.danielleaubert.info/marking-the-dispossessed/ (accessed 12 June 2025).
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Honoré de Balzac, Eugénie Grandet: Autograph manuscript signed and typescript with manuscript revisions, 1925, https://www.themorgan.org/literary-historical/289875, (accessed 12 June 2025).
[9] Ibid.
[10] William Germano, On Reivision, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2021, p. 14.
[11] Marcel Cohen, ‘Autoportrait en lecteur’, Les Belles Lettres, 2017, https://www.ericpestyediteur.com/produit/autoportrait-en-lecteur/, (accessed 9 June 2025).
[12] Marcel Cohen and Roger-Yves Roche, ‘Entretien avec Marcel Cohen’, En attendant Nadeau 2017.https://www.en-attendant-nadeau.fr/2017/07/04/entretien-marcel-cohen/, (accessed 9 June 2025).
[13] Ibid.
[14] Lisa Robertson, Nilling: Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, The Codex, Melancholy, Lucretiun, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias, Book*hug Press, Toronto, 2012, p. 12.
[15] Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries, Fitzcarraldo Editions, London, 2024, p. 116.
[16] Ibid., p. 61.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, Harper Perennial, London, 1989, p. 32.
[19] Byung-Chul Han, Saving Beauty, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2017, p. 65.
[20] Dillard, ob cit., p. 88.
[21] Ibid., p. 12.
[22] Etel Adnan, To Write in a Foreign Language, Electronic Poetry Review, 1996, https://videosoundart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Etel-Adnan_To-Write-in-a-Foreign-Language.pdf (accessed 10 November 2024).
[23] Dillard, ob. cit., p. 99.
[24] Thomas Amouyal, Sara Elkamel and Charlotte York, The Ex-Clown, the Fan, the Stranger and I, Dent-De-Leone, London, 2019, p. 105
[25] Ghislaine Leung, Bosses, Divided Publishing, London, 2023, p. 9.
[26] Ibid.p. 9.
[27] Riet Wijnen, Marlow Moss, Kunstverein Publishing, Amsterdam, 2013, p. 100.
[28] Ibid., p. 83.
[29] Björn Giesecke, Read, Edit, View History, published in partial fulfillment of Master of Arts in Graphic Design at Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn, 2022, p. 94.
[30] Leung, ob. cit., p. 35.
[31] Leung, ob. cit., p.34.