By George Santayana
In his essay "Imagination," George Santayana writes, "There are books during which the footnotes, or the reviews scrawled via a few reader's hand within the margins, could be extra attention-grabbing than the text." Santayana himself was once an inveterate maker of notes within the margins of his books, writing (although smartly, by no means scrawling) reviews that light up, contest, or curiously extend the author's concept. those volumes provide a variety of Santayana's marginalia, transcribed from books in his own library. those notes provide the reader an strange point of view on Santayana's existence and paintings. he's by way of turns serious (often), approving (seldom), literary, slangy, frivolous, or even spiteful. The notes convey his humor, his occasional outcry at a writer's folly, his drawback for the niceties of English prose and the putting of Greek accessory marks. those volumes record alphabetically through writer all of the books extant that belonged to Santayana, reproducing a range of his annotations meant to be of use to the reader or pupil of Santayana's suggestion, his paintings, and his lifestyles. each one access contains a headnote with the author's identify, the name of the paintings, short book info, and the library position of the booklet. no longer all marginalia from a given textual content is integrated; the notes were chosen for content material and elegance. [cut final sentence; reduce whole paragraph if nec.] Santayana, usually residing in solitude, spent loads of his time speaking to, and speaking again to, a superb miscellany of writers, from Spinoza to Kant to J. S. Mill to Bertrand Russell. those notes record these conversations.
