Every Sunday · since 2022
A weekly letter on the overlooked corners of book history.
Marginalia is a weekly newsletter about used bookstores, ephemeral printed objects, and the small histories that live in the margins. Sent every Sunday since 2022 — sometimes 600 words, sometimes 1,200, never an unread.
Read by 4,200 people · No spam, ever · Unsubscribe in one click
What you get
A small letter, well-edited, on time.
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Topics
Bookplates, broadsheets, and the lives of objects.
Each letter takes one small piece of printed history — a marginal note in a 1782 prayer book, the back-room of a London used bookshop, a forgotten typesetter — and follows it where it leads.
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Format
600–1,200 words. Footnotes when needed.
No listicles. No "5 things." One subject per issue, treated with care. Written in plain English with citations linked at the bottom.
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Cadence
Every Sunday morning. ~6 minutes to read.
Lands in your inbox before lunch. Skip a week without guilt — every issue stays in the public archive.
Past issues
Read before you subscribe.
Four recent letters. The full archive — every issue since 2022 — lives on the public archive page.
By the numbers
Sent every Sunday since 2022. Read by 4,200 people in 38 countries.
About the author
Written by one person. Read at one pace.
Allan Ninal
London, UK
I read in libraries and write in cafés. Marginalia started as an excuse to spend Sundays in archives; four years on, it's the longest-running thing I've made.
Reader notes
What readers say
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The only newsletter I read on the day it lands. Slow, careful writing about things I didn't know I cared about until I did.
A reader in Berlin -
Marginalia is what email used to be — a letter from someone who has been thinking, sent to people who want to think too.
A bookseller, Edinburgh -
I forwarded the bookplate issue to four people and three of them subscribed. The other one already had.
A reader in Brooklyn
One Sunday a week
Letters land in your inbox. That's the whole product.
No archive paywall. No referral leaderboard. No upsell. Just one well-edited letter every Sunday.