lament on the demise of footnotes

This I my lament…I do bemoan the end of footnotes.

Pages may have looked more cluttered, and there have been instances where there are more footnotes than text space on any given page – the worst example in my library is Joachim Marquardt's Das Privatleben der Römer, 1886 (reprography by Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt, 1990); in the olden days, I guess, publishers did do anything a learned author wanted.

However, I resent having to go to the back of a book for endnotes all the time, the more so when there are no page number references on top of the endnote pages. The latter should not be difficult in today's age of electronic type-setting. One pays enough for university press books and such anyway…

Comments

[bingley]

Gibbon talks about the different editions of The History of the Decline and Fall in one of the drafts on which his Memoirs of My Life were based, and says:

"... but I cannot be displeased with the two numerous and correct impressions of the English original, which have been published for the use of the continent at Basil in Switzerland (64)."

Gibbon's endnote says:

"64. Of their fourteen octavo volumes, the two last include the whole body of the notes. The public importunity had forced me to remove them from the end of the volume to the bottom of the page: but I have often repented of my compliance."

[John Somer]

Please excuse my intrusion into your discussion, but I seek your knowledge. Does anyone know when documentation of sources became popular, needed, and then a necessity? When did mere scholium or explanatory material turn into specific references to specific texts?

[Helen]

The book The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien has an entire separate story told in its footnotes of an ancient quarrel between two academics, which itself took place through each other's learned but pointed footnotes... would that work in endnotes?? I think not...

[Irene Hahn]

David Meadows of rogueclassicism responds:

... (as I go increasingly to a Cornell notes style of notetaking myself, I can't help but continue to wonder whether sidenotes might be the best way to go in print as well as on the web) ...

[Adrian Murdoch]

Whatever your own preferences, one of the difficulties as a writer is that you have little say over that aspect of design - you tend to have to fall in with whatever is house style with your publisher.

[Dorothy King]

I love foot notes but ... for my last book I wasn't even allowed end notes !

If the notes are just ancient references, I do prefer to have them in square brackets in the text though.

[bingley]

Hear, hear, Irene. I hate having to keep flicking back and forth all the time. If it's just the reference to a source, OK, an endnote will do fine but if it's adding to or explaining something in the text a footnote is the way to go.