Scholars discover rare 16th-century tome with handwritten notes by John Milton

My understanding is that writing notes in the margin has always been a very normal thing to do going back to the middle ages.

Most of the books that survive from that era are family bibles because they were the books treasured and passed down by families, rather than thrown away after reading. The book in TFA was in essence a historical reference so it makes sense he would add notes. These were literally the only places where that kind of knowledge would be stored

This is the second paragraph from the article:

> Add one more title to that small list, as scholars recently discovered a copy of Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland in the Phoenix Public Library, containing handwritten notes in Milton's distinctive hand. This makes the volume extra-special, since only two other books once owned by Milton also contain handwritten notes. The scholars detailed their findings in a new article published in the Times Literary Supplement.

16th century, yet only "recently discovered".

I guess it depends on what you think of as "mass printing", but estimates have it that in the 16th century Venice alone produced around 25,000 editions of books. You can also find references to Italy producing relatively mass amounts of paper by that time, distributed to western Europe and Constantinople through Venice. You really didn't need to be "enormously wealthy" to buy a paper book at the time. Wealthy, to some extent? Yes, moreso revealed by the fact that you were literate, but not crazy wealthy.

Also, in general, people simply often had a different relationship to books than we do today. They were not regarded as priceless objects, or as things ruined by marginalia. Writing marginalia was seen as a fundamental part of reading and owning a book, part of how one understands a book and makes it theirs. Having a personal library was as much about having the books on hand as well as having your margin notes.

The latter half of the 1800s saw the commoditization of consumer goods as industrial manufacturing processes replaced craftsmen. I became aware of this dynamic when I started collecting textiles. The arts and crafts movement in the latter 1800s was founded in direct response to (what they perceived to be) the soulless products produced at scale in factories.

I guess yogh was obsoleted long before this text though as there as several of "gh" and "ch" clusters e.g. "chastise", "chased" and "fought".

A couple of characters can be tricky at first because they look different to late modern latin script, like the s that has two forms in this font. It's actually very easy to read for being an old book.