Some morsels of print culture—personals, short-form obituaries, movie credits, coupon expirations, terms of use—rush by us, unread and unloved, until suddenly, for one reason or another, we care. Footnotes are among those things. The underworld of notes, indexes, and appendices, which book publishers ineloquently call “back matter,” lacks both a good story and the glamour of the main event. Notes seem to beg, by every standard, to be overlooked. But then your needs change, and, when they are gone, you miss them.
I had one such experience recently. I was working on a review of William Deresiewicz’s “Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life” (Free Press), which appeared in last week’s issue of the magazine. Deresiewicz’s reasoning, which is part sociology and part steam-whistle blast, relies heavily on data: a “large-scale survey” about student well-being among college freshmen, statistics from various campuses about post-collegiate employment, and so on. The numbers are supposed to lend credence to his argument, although most are cited without much context. How selective had Deresiewicz been, I wondered, in quoting data from some colleges and not from others? (And how “large-scale” was that survey, really? Had its methodologies or results been contested since publication?) Questions often arise when you read a nonfiction book, and resolving them is usually easy—you just go to the sources. I expected to do a lot of that as I read. The first time a question arose, I flipped to the back of the text.
In the place where the endnotes should have been, there was this direction: “For source notes and suggestions for further reading, go to excellentsheep.com.” O.K., sure. I dropped a pen in the middle of the book to mark my place. I got up. After walking into the next room, where my computer sat, I roused it, proffered my password, and typed the given address. (Actually, that’s only partly true: before making it to the Web page, I checked my e-mail account, my Twitter account, and my Facebook account. One of these sent me to a very interesting article by a colleague of mine, which I read. Then I ate some cheese.) I spent about half an hour trying to find Deresiewicz’s notes, feeling much like the woman in “To Catch a Thief” who opens her jewel box to find the treasures gone.
Since then, I have located the notes (although they’re still not easy to find). Praise the powers. But not all authors have Deresiewicz’s follow-through. Tony Judt’s “Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945,” a wide-ranging and ambitious study (and a Pulitzer Prize finalist), was published, by Penguin, in 2005, with promises of online notes; but they failed to arrive. Instead, Judt posted a thirty-one-page bibliography, a rich but basically useless compendium to a book of more than eight hundred indebted, and presumably densely sourced, pages. More recently, the journalist Rick Perlstein got in trouble for online citations in his book “The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan” (Simon & Schuster). Perlstein did post his notes, including many links to videos, Google Books passages, and archive-request listings. Yet the online endnotes fed other concerns. Before the book’s release, the writer Craig Shirley accused Perlstein of closely paraphrasing his own work without attribution. By placing books’ back matter on the Web, are writers like Perlstein being cutting-edge and helpful, or are they simply being cheap, and obfuscatory, and heading toward intellectual dishonesty?
The answer depends on why a book’s back matter matters. Many readers, and perhaps some publishers, seem to view endnotes, indexes, and the like as gratuitous dressing—the literary equivalent of purple kale leaves at the edges of the crudités platter. You put them there to round out and dignify the main text, but they’re too raw to digest, and often stiff. That’s partly true. (Reviewing the fifteenth edition of “The Chicago Manual of Style” for the magazine, in 2003, Louis Menand noted that “the decorums of citation are the arbitrary residue of ancient pedantries whose raisons d’être are long past reconstructing.”) Still, the back matter is not simply a garnish. Indexes open a text up. Notes are often integral to meaning, and, occasionally, they’re beautiful, too.
“To the inexpert, footnotes look like deep root systems, solid and fixed,” the Princeton scholar Anthony Grafton writes in “The Footnote: A Curious History,” his clever, and heavily noted, study of the form. “To the connoisseur, however, they reveal themselves as anthills, swarming with constructive and combative activity.” Grafton suggests that notes are, in large part, where passive-aggressive sallies take shape. (Endnotes might be best for snideness, since, like the expert spitball shooter, they are perched far from the point of impact.) But annotation isn’t an invention of modern scholarship. The Hebrew Bible is, famously, a text that comments on itself, weaving elaborations of its own meaning into its various iterations. Grafton touts the French philosopher Pierre Bayle, whose “Historical and Critical Dictionary,” published in the sixteen-nineties, sometimes used its explosion of footnotes as an intricate and sophisticated form of argument, as an early virtuoso of the form. Noting is old. Yet it’s precisely because of its oldness that, for books, back matter is important—especially given the advent of new reading technologies.
Online, explicit source citation tends to be redundant: you don’t need notes, because, ideally, you can click to an original source. In this context, the removal of back matter makes some kind of sense. But publishers aren’t taking endnotes off the Web. They’re putting them _on _the Web. Instead, back matter is starting to vanish from books, the one place where it’s still very much needed. At print magazines such as The New Yorker, every word of every sentence is checked (and, where necessary, cross-checked) against original sources, for accuracy and context; if an error somehow slips through the net, it is corrected, and the change is announced. Nonfiction books almost never get such scrutiny, however, so notes are a crucial mark of intellectual good faith. Back matter cannot bolster every claim, but it builds authority by allowing for the possibility of imperfection. “Go ahead—check me,” the notes say. “It’s all there.”
Sometimes, of course, they do more. Consider a writer like the nineteenth-century clergyman John Hodgson, whose multipart “A History of Northumberland” included a footnote running well over a hundred pages. Or consider Edward Gibbon’s “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” published beginning in the seventeen-seventies, which is often thought to have the finest discursive notes ever produced—wry, playful, often snide. Putting those notes online would destroy the work; they are an integral component of the text. More recently, footnotes have been employed to postmodern effect: Vladimir Nabokov and David Foster Wallace used them flamboyantly; writers such as Nicholson Baker applied them from a softer palette. But the earnest, substantial note is not a thing of the past; it still crops up regularly in works of philosophy, history, and even journalism. Certain New Yorker contributors are known, within the magazine, as clever and delightful note writers, even though their elaborations are intended for the eyes of editors alone.
This augmentative beauty is what’s lost when back matter is banished to a third literary space like the Internet. Books are not a perfect technology—they may not even, at this point, be the best technology for reading—but they’re exquisitely compact. “Das Kapital” changed the course of modern history, but if the type is small enough you can stuff the whole volume in your pocket and read it en route to your corporate job. When you leave for a beach weekend, you do not need to pack a novel and its final chapters separately; no one spends hours searching her bookshelves for the endnotes to a volume in her hand. (“I feel like I just saw them yesterday!”) So why are publishers forcing readers to do that on laptops? The reading of books, we’re often told, is imperilled. If that’s true, we ought not be driven toward increased distraction.
By these changing habits, we lose more than we gain, and not just on the page. My first job after college was at an academic press. My first responsibility there was proofreading the back matter of books: checking the form and alphabetization of indexes, making sure that the “Notes to pages 234-245” tags cited the right pages. The tasks were modest, but those of us who carried them out felt that we were doing holy work. We were taking something intricate and powerful and giving it a final polish. I still believe in that refinement. Publishers’ tendency to take back matter out of books is cheap and lazy, and it only makes for trouble. If the goal is to retain readers, publishers should show how much books can do. If the object is authority, writers ought to earn it. Books, at their best, are entrancing objects. From here on out, let them put their best footnotes forward.
