The post by

on marginalia is very interesting. However, it brought to mind the section called ‘Well readship’ in Stephen Potter’s Lifemanship, published in 1950. Potter was a lecturer in English at the University of Oxford, and in this extract on ‘marginaliaship’ was clearly intended to poke gentle fun at those people who write in books purely to show off to other readers. In the extract (pictured) Coad is one of the characters in the book, a student at the Lifemanship Correspondence College, which teaches people how to be one-up on everyone else!