Excerpt from Book
Chapter 1: The Endangered Footnote The need for an adequate book on footnotes is obvious. One of the earliest and most ingenious inventions of humankind, the footnote has been for centuries an indispensable tool of the scholar and a source of endlessly varied delight for the layperson. The lack until now of a substantial and appropriately annotated study of its nature, its history, its friends and enemies can only be ascribed to complacency. Annotators and literary connoisseurs simply have assumed too easily the continuing survival of this important adjunct to the printing press. Such complacency is no longer possible. Gone is the time when the Reverend John Hodgson, the distinguished nineteenth-century historian, could unselfconsciously devote one quarto of his multivolume account of Northumberland County (England) to a single gigantic footnote on the Roman Wall. Nor could the equally well-known historian Edward Gibbon expect any longer to be congratulated for allocating one-fourth of his space inThe Decline and Fall of the Roman Empireto footnotes. Footnotes distress publishers, who unfortunately lurk behind every book. They find notes unsightly, costly, forbidding. Toward the end of the twentieth century, publishers foisted upon the reader a recondite game to further discourage the use of notes. The game goes like this: First you must fix in your mind the number of the footnote, say 27, then you have to remember the page number on which footnote 27 appears, say page 85. Then you must turn to the back of the book, trying to keep your place with an inserted finger, and scan page after page until you discover one headed "Footnotes for Pages 81-107." By this time you have forgotten the footnote number so you must scramble back to the original page and seek it out again, sitting small and sulkily, in the text. Only enthusiasts of acrostic puzzles and nine-digit ZIP codes can possibly persist in this game. So complicated have publishers made the arrangement of notes, in fact, that help from sophisticated mathematics has been required. Utilizing the theory of sets and subsets, a so-called Hoffman system has been devised to guide annotators in the placement of their notes. It provides an intricate flow chart complete with little boxes and directional arrows -- the kind of thing General Motors uses to keep track of its spare parts. Several firms have gone so far as to announce that they will not burden their texts with footnotes, as if conferring a favor upon their readers. Others have slyly encouraged a writer or two to put up a Web site for the footnotes that have been refused the hospitality of the book itself. The notion seems to be that this way the scholar can find the "dull" citations if needed while the general reader can have an uninterruptedgood read. We know this to be nonsense, of course. The layperson as well as the scholar enjoys footnotes. They can be charming, an encouragement to read on, worth every penny of the extra expense. The Letters of Evelyn Waughmight easily have been published without any interruption by its editor. But then we never would have learned that the "pornographer" whom Waugh said fed a horse vodka and got bitten for his pains was Norman Mailer. Nor would we have learned that Mailer -- tracked down by the indefatigable editor -- insisted that he had not been trying to get the horse drunk but was merely patting it. Such information keeps us reading, but the main job of the footnote is to interrupt. Simply interrupt. A stern, no-nonsense lecture on the eighteenth-century belief that the universe was a smooth-running machine is being delivered. Suddenly, from the bottom of the page, a voice whispers, "It should be pointed out, however, that de la Mettrie, the author of the famous bookMan The Machine,died of over eating and gout; he stoked the machine too well." The reader is intensely grateful for this human interruption.Review Quote
Amanda Heller The Boston Globe In this short volume -- festooned of course with a rococo profusion of bottom-of-the-page diversions and digressions -- Zerby presents colorful examples of footnote use....A spirited defense of a little-loved and endangered species.Review Quote
Michael Pakenham The Baltimore Sun [A] charming, witty history and exploration of the formal written aside.
Footnotes have not had it easy. Their dominance of eighteenth- and nineteenth- century literature and scholarship was both hard-won -- following many years of struggle -- and doomed, as it led to belittlement in the twentieth century. In The Devil's Details, Chuck Zerby playfully explores footnotes' long and illustrious history and makes a clarion call to save them from the new world of the Internet and hypertext. In a story that boasts a marvelous plot and a rogues' gallery of players, Zerby examines traditional footnotes and their less-buttoned-down incarnations, as when used by pornographers. Yes, The Devil's Details is full of surprises: Zerby hunts down the first bona fide fully functioning footnote; unearths a multivolume history of Northumberland County, England, that uses one volume for a single footnote; and uncovers a murder plot. He even explains why footnotes are like blind dates. Carefully researched and highly opinionated, The Devil's Details affirms that delight in reading can come from unexpected places.