IJ study archive

Wallace's book marginalia: the 2010 Ransom Center press-gallery photographs (ten authors)

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TL;DR

Photographs of Wallace's annotated books from his personal library at the Harry Ransom Center — ten authors, published by the Center in its 2010 press galleries and recoverable now only through the Internet Archive. This is a visual-reference survey, not an interpretive source: it identifies each photographed book, describes what kind of annotator Wallace was in it, and transcribes what the low-resolution images make legible. The headline finds: the famous "notes filling a copy of Players" image turns out to show Wallace drafting his own IRS/Peoria material (early Pale King work) in the DeLillo book's blank pages; his advance proof of Williamson's Borges biography preserves the commission terms of his "Borges on the Couch" review ("2,000–4,000 words, due 'mid-October' — Bonnie"); his Rabbit, Run carries the Great Male Narcissists verdict in margin form ("RABBIT MOURNS HIMSELF"); and the four mass-market genre books (Ellroy, Harris, King, C.S. Lewis) show the color-coded close-reading and prepared discussion questions of his popular-fiction teaching. Every reading here is subject to the attribution cautions below.

Provenance cautions

These bind every claim made from these photographs, and they are stated first deliberately. Bonnie Nadell, Wallace's agent, has explained (see hf-nadell-changes-to-wallace-archive) that the library reached the archive in the disorder of grief, and that the 2011 review found: (a) some books had been bought at garage sales or given to Wallace already annotated by other hands — "scholars in the archives might think they were reading David's thoughts... and they were actually some stranger's"; and (b) some pages carried third parties' personal information and were later covered or removed. These 2010 press photographs pre-date that July 2011 provenance review, so nothing in them had yet been screened for mis-attribution.

Accordingly, for each book below this survey notes what supports the annotations being Wallace's own (ownership signatures, addresses in his name, content unmistakably tied to his projects, hand consistency) — and where such support is absent, says so. No annotation from these images should be treated as Wallace's words without that check. A further caution: hand-drawn phone numbers and addresses appear in two of these photographs; per Nadell's account that class of content is exactly what the archive later redacted, and it is reproduced here only as already-published material.

What the galleries are

Two sibling 2010 galleries, photographed spread-by-spread: a "books" set (DeLillo, McCarthy, Ozick, Stead, Updike, Williamson) and a "teaching" set (Ellroy, Harris, King, C.S. Lewis). Twenty-nine photographs survive; one (a second Ellroy spread) was never archived and is unrecoverable. Most authors get exactly two images — cover + one annotated spread — so these are curated glimpses, not surveys of each book's full annotation layer (the McCarthy spread, for instance, shows ink bleeding through from a page the camera never saw). The photographs are small (roughly 300–700 pixels), which limits transcription: block capitals and large cursive read well; Wallace's small script often does not, and this note says "unread" rather than guessing.

DeLillo — Players and Ratner's Star

Files: 4 (covers + one front-matter spread each; both Vintage Contemporaries paperbacks).

The Players spread is the image several 2010–2012 archive write-ups reproduced (see kut-dunbar-consider-ransom-center and lisagold-dfw-archive-roundup): the book's praise page and its facing blank filled edge-to-edge with red ink. What the captions never said, and the image shows, is what the notes are: not commentary on DeLillo but Wallace drafting his own IRS material — the world of The Pale King. Legible spans (uncertain words bracketed):

  • "Guy hired as lawyer for IRS. Sent to Peoria, but no one ever [complains of contests] audits/[CED] in Peoria"
  • "[person] whose big s[ht]ick is that they complain about the quality of the food at every meal but eat huge quantities of it"
  • "Tax belief: Computers ca[n] save people from boredom"
  • "Accounting for Insurance — ordinary income vs. expense [drawn hold] / the expense could be [carried later]... the less charged against earlier income"
  • "recondite Semantics / indemnity" (a vocabulary pair)
  • Repeated, boxed name candidates: "Brodnax" (thrice, once as a boxed "BRODNAX"), "Gillian", "[Loat]"
  • Beside a review blurb: "he gets audited"; bottom corner: "Suit your own self."; and a cursive name at top right reading [David Wallace].

More than half the smaller red script is unreadable at this size and is left unread. Attribution: strong — the cursive name, plus content unmistakably belonging to Wallace's own late project.

The Ratner's Star spread is a different animal: a page-indexed reading log in three ink colors, with a recurring "Ask —" formula that reads like prepared discussion questions. Legible entries include:

  • "p.9 – 'Right age for Americans' – So we're set in late 70s. So why Sony aircra[ft] w/ rock garden, Sweden at war?"
  • "31 – All these references to Thales a[nd] Heraclitus"
  • "36 – Revise view of past – foreshadow[s] plot's climax"
  • "Ask – Billy's fascination w/ gross body functions and smells (004, etc.) Point? – Science a medicine for [primal] horror of the physical?"
  • "116–117 – Ask: Math allegory of writing. Is Lit's only measure its beauty?"
  • "[Discussion] novel w/o movement – Various persons come on stage, speak their piece, go."
  • A chapter list matching the novel's part-one chapter titles ("ch.1 Substation / ch.2 Flow..."), and at bottom: "Book set [for] '100 Years' a[fter] 'Frege's Foundations of Math'... & 100 yrs after birth of Einstein [1879]–1979"; "Ask – How would a Structuralist read this?"

Attribution: a cursive name at top right reads [D. Wallace]; the hand matches the Players spread.

Against the published accounts. The KUT caption ("Notes filling a copy of 'Players'") is borne out but under-describes the image: the notes fill it, and they are working notes for Wallace's own fiction. The New Statesman's archive report (see newstatesman-foster-in-the-archive) says notes for Infinite Jest were "jotted on the title pages and in the margins" of his DeLillo novels; these photographs confirm the practice — own-project drafting on DeLillo title pages — while showing that in Players, at least on this spread, the visible layer belongs to the Pale King era, not to Infinite Jest. So a caution for anyone citing "the notes in the DeLillo books": they are not all one project, and the Players image in circulation is not IJ genesis material. The Players passage Stephen Burn reports as marked "the model for the A.F.R.'s vengeance" (see burn-ij-readers-guide) would sit on an interior text page — no interior Players page was photographed, so that claim can be neither confirmed nor challenged from here. The DeLillo titles the other archive essays describe (White Noise, End Zone, Great Jones Street, Americana) are absent from this gallery.

McCarthy — Suttree

Files: 2 (cover + inside-front spread; Vintage Contemporaries).

A sparse spread by this gallery's standards: a blue word cluster and one large diamond-boxed verdict on the endpaper — "Set-up is slow — d[oe]s not set s[t]age" — a structural judgment in Wallace's hand. The praise page carries "Mom's n[a]m[e]: Grace McKel[l]ar" (plot-tracking, in red), a black note beside the author photo reading only as "[Callahy] [chunky] killer" (all three words uncertain), and — the spread's oddest feature — ink doodled directly on McCarthy's author photograph: round spectacles and facial hair drawn over his face. The endpaper's word cluster ("Toy Tot / [R]ot Tot / TyKy / [Clooty]") reads like collected coinages but every token is uncertain. Ink from an unphotographed page (a page-indexed list, mirrored) shows through the endpaper: this copy is annotated well beyond what the one photograph shows. Attribution: a cursive name at top reads [D. Wallace]. No published account of the Suttree copy exists in this archive to compare against.

Ozick — The Puttermesser Papers

Files: 2 (jacket + front endpaper spread; 1997 hardcover, so a post-Infinite Jest acquisition).

The endpapers are a pure vocabulary-harvesting surface — the word-list practice known from Wallace's dictionary and compiled lists (see wordnik-dfw-circled-dictionary-words and the circled-words notes), here operating inside a novel. Some twenty-five entries in green, blue, and black, several with his own glosses. Fully legible: a boxed "brobdingnagian – huge, immense – porn star w/ brobdingnagian penises"; "antitabagism – hatred of/opposition to smoking"; "thyrsus – wand of Dionysus ([look up])". Legible list entries include telluric, pullulating, Schadenfreude, periphrasis, pleonasm, terza rima, fructuous, elutriation, immiscible, bosky, parataxis, antiphrastic, deictic, and "[Vomerine] divide – little slash in center of upper lip" (his gloss for the philtrum), plus "Spinney (??)" — the double question mark is Wallace's own. The left endpaper has a cursive name [D. Wallace] and a rotated address block reading "[1026] [...] / Bloomin[gton] I[L] / 61701" (street line unresolved). Attribution: strong (name + Bloomington address). No literary commentary is visible anywhere on the spread.

Stead — The Man Who Loved Children

Files: 2 (cover + endpaper/half-title spread; Picador edition with the Franzen cover blurb).

An image-collector's page: a bulleted list of sensory images and phrases, some quoted from Stead — "'Suet-colored cheeks'"; "A man who sits so still he seems alone in the room (185)" — and some reading as Wallace's own observational stock: "MN summer morning – dew: everything perspired."; "Midwest autumn — Great blotched copses and lion-yellow fields"; "A guy who's a fantastic whistler"; "Little kid squatting drawing intricately on the ground with a finger"; "The sky a vapor blue". At the top of the half-title: "When you're a child, you think that boredom is the province [of] childr[en] [only]" (tail uncertain) — a boredom thought parked in a book margin. Three circled name-like tokens sit beside the title: "[Jenis] / At[w]ater / [Ryatt]"; the middle token reads most naturally as "Atwater", a name Wallace later used in "The Suffering Channel", but at this resolution that identification stays a candidate reading, not a claim. The endpaper carries "D. Wallace / 398-0499" (name + phone) and a publication-context note: "1940 Pulitzer Prize — Grapes of Wrath". Attribution: strong (name + phone). No published account of this copy exists here to compare against.

Updike — Rabbit, Run

Files: 2 (cover + inside-front spread; battered Fawcett mass-market, a 1980s printing).

The marginalia are a verdict. Across the front matter, in block capitals, underlined: "RABBIT MOURNS HIMSELF"; beneath a blurb, the spread's clearest sentence: "p.1 As his sight dim[m]ed Rabbit resaw every sight he'd ever seen. Here they all are, each exhaustively described[!]" — the mock-elegy for Updike's descriptive exhaustiveness, followed by an uncertain bracketed "[Committal]" and "p. 104 —". Also underlined: "S[a]d Smelling"; a green note reading only as "[Weedy] Easter[n] [kids]". Two diagonal note blocks are mostly beyond this photograph's resolution; only fragments are secure ("Think [of] all the [wonderful] he's been exposed to: Heaven..."). This is the private register of the judgment Wallace published in "Certainly the End of Something or Other" — the Great Male Narcissists essay in margin form. Attribution: cautious — no ownership name is visible on this spread; the case rests on the Center's own labeling of the gallery and the hand's consistency with the other books, and the Nadell garage-sale caution applies with full force to an old mass-market paperback like this one.

Williamson — Borges: A Life (advance proof)

Files: 2 (cover + inside-front spread).

The cover identifies itself: "ADVANCE UNCORRECTED PROOFS — NOT FOR SALE" — this is the working copy behind Wallace's November 2004 New York Times review "Borges on the Couch," and the spread is the densest annotation in these galleries after Players. At top left, the commission memo: "2,000 – 4,000 W[or]ds / Due 'mid-October' } Bonnie" — the review's terms, in Wallace's hand, attributed to his agent Bonnie Nadell. A Post-it names the earlier rival biography: "Emir Rodriguez Monegal's 'Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biograph[y]'". The red synthesis block on the left page reads in part: "B, like Kafka, writes what appear to be allegorical [fables], but instead of universal referents... familiar, endlessly metaphysical. Modern fables, about everything, especially who's real and how a person is to decide who's [real]"; and "307–309:... 'God's Writing,' which is one of the great modern fables of mystical illumination... For Williamson, though, the story is mainly 'a story of [interrogation] [...] indebtedness'..." — recognizably the published review's argument (that Williamson reduces the fictions to biography) in draft. Some thirty page-keyed reading notes run down the right page; clearest are "164 – B's bad eyes" (boxed), "70 – B's early [role in] the Spanish avant-garde Ultra[ism]", "51-52: W makes much of B's bad grades in School...", "41 – Librarian at the [...]". Next to the printed proofs-confidentiality box someone — presumably the annotator — has drawn a circled smiley face. Attribution: about as strong as this material gets without a signature — a reviewer's working proof whose notes track the published review's argument.

Ellroy — The Big Nowhere

Files: 3 (cover + two interior spreads, pp. 90–91 and 150–151; a second interior spread was never archived and is lost). From the Center's teaching gallery.

The first interior text pages in the set, and the first look at Wallace reading a crime novel with a red pen: long underlined runs of Ellroy's dialogue plus short analytic verdicts. The clearest note, in emphatic capitals beside the Buzz Meeks material on p. 91: "SELF HATE the k[e]y". Above it, only partly readable: "On Meeks — [...] — Self-hat[r]ed". On p. 150 a vertical margin note tallies one of Dudley Smith's verbal tics — reading approximately "[That's] [5x] this phrase... ['the lad']" — the craft-attention of a writer counting another writer's repetitions. The underlined passages (Ellroy's print, marked by Wallace) cluster on character-voice set pieces: the smartest-stupid-man speech, the "That lad is very very good." exchange. Attribution: cautious — no ownership mark is visible in the three surviving photographs; the case is the Center's labeling plus the marking system's consistency with the Harris and King copies below. No published account of this copy exists here to check.

Harris — The Silence of the Lambs

Files: 5 (cover, film-credits page, and interior pp. 16–17, 22–23, 200–201; St. Martin's 1991 movie tie-in paperback, heavily worn). The richest sequence in the galleries.

A full teaching close-read in at least four ink layers. The film-credits page carries an ownership block — "DAVID WALLACE / 160 Foster, Brighton / 787-0457" — that, with the 1991 tie-in printing, places the copy's acquisition in Wallace's Boston years; around the movie credits he has written the novel's character names and working theses: "Chilton is the book's only f[oo]l"; "Gum[b] w[ants] to become a Woman"; a numbered scheme on control only partly readable; at bottom, fragments about Lecter and handcuffs ("...[the point] is that Lecter [can't] be Controlled"). The interior pages show the method:

  • pp. 16–17 (Starling meets Lecter): "Effeminate" written in green over the opening line; the maroon-eyes and dignity-pants passages underlined; a red "Ask – [...]" question with unresolved tail.
  • pp. 22–23 (first interview): a fully legible prepared discussion question in green at the page top — "What does L's polydactyly symbolize?" — and beside the Sicily church-collapse speech, "God is [polydactyl]" (moderately confident reading given the facing question); fragments upper left reading "...evidence that God [and] evil are alike"; a green "Likes her[;] [she's] gutsy..." in the margin. Underlined: "I collect church collapses, recreationally.", the rube/cheap-birthstones speech, "Being smart spoils a [lot]".
  • pp. 200–201 (Senator Martin): fully legible at top — "Lecter feeds on pain" — beside the underlined sip-of-her-pain sentence; "Appeal to Sense-memory" beside "Thirsty work..."; a left-margin note beginning "Lecter has complete Control over his [conversation]...".

Attribution: strong (full name, address, phone, plus teaching notes consistent with the documented course use of this title). The address and phone number are exactly the personal-data class Nadell describes the archive later redacting; they are transcribed here only because the Center itself published the photograph.

King — Carrie

Files: 4 (cover, inside-front spread, interior pp. 46–47 and 54–55; early-90s Signet printing, penciled "new 5.99"). Teaching gallery.

A single-color (red) teaching read, thinner than the Harris copy but the same system. Inside the cover, a character thesis: "Carrie is st[u]ck – the geek in school – ugly, [slow], [poor]. What [saved] her is a [craving], a desire to fit in..." with a diagonal "Fighting against Mom's insanity", and a big red "WALLACE" signature across the publisher's teaser page. On pp. 46–47: "Sue not Stuck —" (continuation uncertain), a vertical "Pov. of Sue [+] [her] Mom", and underlining of the "To Conform, in the infinitive" passage. On pp. 54–55, the allegory tags: "VICTIM" in underlined capitals; "Closet as Sym[b]ol" vertically in the margin; "[Humor]" beside King's parenthetical "(if I had a nickel for every time she made me cry here)"; and at bottom "Momma sees C[arrie] as evidence of her sin — Momma [= God's curse]" (first clause confident, the equation's tail uncertain). Underlined: the closet-door passage with its "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" reference. Attribution: strong (signature; documented course text).

C.S. Lewis — The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Files: 3 (cover + interior pp. 178–179 and 196–197; HarperCollins paperback). Teaching gallery.

A blue-pen allegory-tracking read. On the resurrection pages: "Aslan resurrected!" at top left; "Alt[a]r?" and "Stone t[a]ble" above the Deeper Magic passage, whose willing-victim / "Death itself would start working backward" sentences are underlined with the phrase "the Table" circled; beside the romp, "L[ots] of thump [+] thud". On the Edmund pages: "Edmund hero" and "How old?"; the fully legible plot-logic note "So if Aslan had banished Ed, battle would have been lost" with "[L's] [moment] of [weakness]"; "Symb: Lucy h[ea]ls Ed[mund]" and "Wound Heal[er]" in the left margin; "But [what] [would] that cost?" on the right; and at bottom, "[Sinner] doesn't know what [...] did f[or] him" (middle word unresolved). The underlinings track the grace machinery — Edmund found "covered with blood", restored, and knighted; "Must more people die for Edmund?". Attribution: cautious — no ownership mark in these three photographs; the case is the Center's labeling and consistency with the other teaching copies. A children's paperback is also a plausible gift copy, so the Nadell caution genuinely applies here.

What this survey does and does not establish

Taken together the galleries document three distinct annotation practices, each in a different register: (1) the library as notebook — own-project drafting (Players), image-collection (Stead), and vocabulary harvest (Ozick) in books' blank spaces, with the book itself sometimes barely engaged; (2) the working professional's copy — review prep (Williamson) and structural verdicts (McCarthy, Updike); (3) the teacher's copy — the multi-color underline-and-question system across all four genre paperbacks. Almost none of it is about Infinite Jest: the one IJ-adjacent expectation a reader might bring (the reported IJ notes in the DeLillo books) is neither confirmed nor refuted by what was photographed, and the Players image so often circulated as Wallace-on-DeLillo marginalia is in fact Pale King drafting. The survey's value is as a primary-image check on the secondary descriptions of the archive's marginalia, and as texture for how Wallace read — and used — other people's books.

Cross-references