The Devil's Details

This surprising history of the footnote starts with the assumption that footnotes are not solely the province of academics and bibliophiles. On the contrary, this book argues that footnotes can enchant and inform readers through tributes to people, characters, heroes, and lovers. Scholars have employed them, of course, but so have poets, novelists, memorialists, and pornographers. Written with clarity and erudition, this book presents the history of the first genuine footnote—an annotation in a 17th-century poem by England’s first female poet—and other fascinating footnote tales, such as the discovery of a multivolume book that uses one entire volume for a single footnote and the use of footnotes to footnotes. This history pays tribute to the joy of reading footnotes and makes a compelling case that they are too important, too interesting, and too entertaining to be left to scholars.