Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote in 1844, “In the marginalia, too, we talkonly to ourselves; we therefore talk freshly — boldly — originally — with abandonnement— without conceit.”1

In getting my books, I have been always solicitous of an ample margin; this not so much through any love of the thing in itself, however agreeable, as for the facility it affords me of penciling suggested thoughts, agreements and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general. Where what I have to note is too much to be included within the narrow limits of a margin, I commit it to a slip of paper, and deposit it between the leaves; taking care to secure it by an imperceptible portion of gum tragacanth paste. — Edgar Allen Poe on marginalia

Blackwood Magazine most likely introduced the term in 1819, but Edgar Allan Poe popularized it some 25 years later with some of his published material: Marginalia. Since then, authors have had varying degrees of success creating their own collections of published marginalia. Among them is Walter Benjamin, who struggled after 13 years of research, leaving behind The Arcades Project: "the theater," he called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas"

The letters of “aeros” include the five most frequent letters used in English (as Edgar Allan Poe pointed out in the cryptographic challenge included in his famous short story The Golden Beetle)

She referred to the high-rise as if it were some kind of huge animate presence, brooding overthem and keeping a magisterial eye on the events taking place. There was something in thisfeeling — the elevators pumping up and down the long shafts resembled pistons in the chamberof a heart. The residents moving along the corridors were the cells in a network of arteries,the lights in their apartments the neurones of a brain (J.G. Ballard, 1975: 40).