‘In defence of visibly used books’: Hannah Wei wins Bodleian book-collecting prize
17 June 2026
We’re delighted to congratulate Hannah Wei (BA English, 2023) on being awarded this year’s Colin Franklin Prize for Book Collecting by the Bodleian Library’s Centre for the Study of the Book. The purpose of the prize is to encourage the collecting of books and other printed material by students, with the award based on ‘the interest, originality, thoughtfulness, promise and creativity of the collection and persistence of the collector’.
Hannah writes,
‘My collection is titled “Traces of its action in the world”: In Defence of Visibly Used Books. The title quote is by Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe, who argues that we should look at books as objects with their own histories, rather than simply abstract texts as so many literary scholars do. As the title suggests, it’s a collection of annotated second-hand books from the last century. My collection goes against the mainstream opinion of treating marginalia as a negative, and celebrates its presence instead as something which can bring joy as well as acting as records of a book’s history.
The inspiration for this collection came from my own love of reading books with annotations in them, especially the heavily marked-up copies of textbooks and other popular student material that you find in libraries. I loved being able to get a headstart on an essay or find some helpful notes in the margins of a text. I felt like I was able to participate in a lively scholarly discussion even when in actuality I was just reading by myself in an empty library, often late at night. At the same time, I was working on my material text paper for my course, in which we would often look at marginalia and scribal/reader additions to manuscripts. In the world of medieval manuscripts, marginalia is celebrated and valued; but modern-day marginalia is maligned and considered a ‘defacement’ – annotated books are always sold as ‘poor’ quality volumes online. The sharp contrast between the way two types of marginalia are treated intrigued me and the prize gave me the perfect opportunity to explore this.’
‘In the margins’: Exploring centuries of marginalia, doodles and signs of book use
We couldn’t pass up the opportunity for a book display curated by Hannah and the Hertford librarians! Inspired by Hannah’s celebration of visibly used books, it also showcased some of Hertford Library’s historic books with ownership marks, including a recently rediscovered book owned by 17th-century philosopher and bibliophile John Locke and our very rare annotated first edition of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica.