Boredom and fanatical politics spur some to take up a pen. But often graffiti is a way to say something of which one might otherwisebe ashamed.

Indeed, graffiti's anonymity is its greatest attraction, says Todd Heatherton, assistant professor of psychology

"It's an opportunity for people to say very socially unacceptable things in a place where they're sure other people will see it," Heatherton says. "Its really hard to get caught writing graffiti."

"We are fairly politically correct here," Heatherton adds, "and people who don't go along with that may feel they're being censored by the community. This is their form of aggression."

But some students just have something to say and no one to listen. In the pages of books on reserve at Lamont and Hilles, for example, readers carry on an intergenerational chatter.

"Down with democracy, eh Morgan?" reads a forthright late-1950s script in a copy of Edmund Morgan's The Puritan Dilemma, on reserve at Lamont.

In his history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Morgan praises the "efficiency of despotism" and champion Puritan John Winthrop over his rival, Thomas Dudley.

In impassioned marginalia, Morgan's long-ago reader sided with Dudley. "As I sit here, looking into the Governor Thomas Dudley Memorial Garden. I feel that history has vindicated Dudley," his faded block capitals read. "After all, the only Harvard landmark named after Winthrop is a JOCK HOUSE."

A more recent reader disagrees with the indictment. "We can't all be coordinated, can we?" he writes underneath in blue pen.

Librarians trying to keep discipline in their realm, can't be happy about this form of graffiti.

But while she discourages comments in the margins, Hilles and Lamont librarian Heather E. Cole says she understands the motivation behind them.

"Some people see books as friends--that they talk to," Cole explains.

And this form of graffiti can occasionally be valuable, Cole says. Houghton Library, for example, contains books once owned by famous writers.

"Those books have marginalia that is interesting to scholars studying the author," says Cole." There is no reason why the comments of an undergraduate student reading a work of scholarship might not be just as interesting."

Still, the College doesn't recognize book scribbling as an authentic form of scholarship yet.