Marginalian Editions

Marginalian Editions is a collaboration between Sarah McNally of McNally Jackson Books and writer Maria Popova, who selects and introduces forgotten masterworks that deserve a second life—uncommon books at the intersection of wonder and our search for meaning, from science and philosophy to poetry and children’s literature.

Books

Willard Gibbs: The Whole Is Simpler than Its Parts

Muriel Rukeyser

Foreword by Maria Popova

Marginalian Editions presents a groundbreaking poet’s biography of the forgotten scientist who founded physical chemistry, shaping much of the 20th century—and an ingenious, expansive treatise on American creativity, character, and remembrance.

COMING FEB 25, 2025

Is Peace Possible?

Kathleen Lonsdale

Foreword by Maria Popova

Marginalian Editions presents a trailblazing Quaker scientist’s slender masterwork of moral courage, penned at the height of the Cold War, envisioning a transformation of the human spirit and our politics that might enable the triumph of peace.

COMING APR 15, 2025

Alpha and Omega

Jane Ellen Harrison

Foreword by Maria Popova

From Marginalian Editions: a far-seeing essay collection by the iconoclastic historian Jane Ellen Harrison—heroine to generations of writers from Virginia Woolf to Mary Beard—that explores the invisible tendrils between science and the sacred, the psychology of bias, the fulcrum of progress, and the countercultural courage of changing our minds in light of new understanding.

COMING JUN 3, 2025

Maria Popova

Maria Popova is the creator of The Marginalian (founded in 2006 under the name Brain Pickings), which is included in the Library of Congress’s permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. She is the author of Figuring and Traversals, the editor of A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader, and the maker of The Universe in Verse—a live celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry, which is now a book.