BKS.

Ideas

Marginalia

By Bikesh Chaudhary

Unfinished: what a public archive would look like if readers could write in it.

Published
Reading time
1 min read (estimated)
Length
85 words
Tags
readingsocialunfinished

Sample writing.Nothing has been published to the library yet, so the shelves are showing placeholder pieces written to demonstrate the reading experience. They are not Bikesh’s work, and the first real entry replaces the whole set.

Begin reading
1 min left

Second-hand books are better than new ones because somebody argued with them in pencil.

There is a version of a personal library where a reader can leave a note against a paragraph — not a comment thread at the bottom, which is a different and worse thing, but a mark in the margin at the exact sentence that provoked it.

Everything hard about this is moderation, and everything good about it is that the marks would be by people who read to the end.

Marginalia — written by Bikesh Chaudhary, July 2026.