| Sumario: | Sir Thomas Smith (1513–77), ambassador, lawyer, and secretary, was a prolific reader and annotator of his library, which he bequeathed to the Old Library of Queens' College, Cambridge. This article examines Smith's highly visual style of annotation, which involved drawing pictures of people, cities, geographical features and various other symbols in the margins as a means of "mapping" the text. Limiting myself to Smith's collection of historiographical works at Queens', I suggest that Smith's annotations responded directly to visual and organizational strategies employed by the authors, publishers, and printers of these works. Following the methodology of the history of the book and treating these works as "material" as well as literary texts, I will align Smith's response to the illustrative and typographical-spatial features of his books with the historiographical debates that they presented. In doing so I aim to provide an intellectual rationale for Smith's extraordinarily visual and spatial style of annotation, which I call his "chorographical" reading.
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