Thinking in the Margins: What Oliver Sacks jotted down in the books he read.

This article focuses on the discovery and significance of neurologist and author Oliver Sacks’s extensive personal library and his prolific practice of annotating books throughout his life. After Sacks’s death in 2015, his partner undertook the challenging task of sorting his approximately 10,000-volume collection, uncovering around 500 books filled with marginalia that reveal Sacks’s spontaneous reflections on medicine, philosophy, and personal musings. These annotations, now held by the New York Public Library as part of its Oliver Sacks archive acquired in 2024, offer unique insights into his intellectual engagement with thinkers such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Kant. The article also touches on Sacks’s declining vision in his later years and how he adapted his reading and writing practices accordingly. [Extracted from the article]