The annotations of Oliver Sacks

 Bill Hayes said Oliver Sacks annotated about 500 of his 10,000 books.

I like that. I don’t make notes in every book either.

Hayes pointed out a couple of things about Sacks’s habit. First, annotating is a kind of thinking. Sacks wasn’t making a note to remind himself of something when he came back to the book later. He might not return to his notes. Making notes was just a way of thinking about what he was reading.

Second, Hayes said an annotation was essentially impulsive. The reflections went into the 600 notebooks Sacks left behind. The immediate responses are in the margins of his books.

• Source: Bill Hayes, “Thinking in the Margins”; The American Scholar, March 19, 2026. It’s here:

https://theamericanscholar.org/thinking-in-the-margins/