How many of you pass over the foot and end notes when you read?

[The Lone Liberal]

Well you need to stop that immediately. You miss some really good shit when you pass over the notes. Example you say? How about the book I am reading now, which is titled Krakatoa. One of the footnotes pertains to Helena Blavatsky, who was the founder of Theosophy. http://www.blavatsky.net/

Now here is why you should read the notes. The footnotes in this book tells us that Helena Blavatsky believed that Lemuria, an island close by Krakatoa, was home of a people she called the “Third Root of Mankind.” Now listen to what she thought they looked like, they were fifteen feet tall, brown-skinned hermaphrodites with four arms, some possessing a third eye in the back of the skull. Their feet had protruding heels enabling them to walk either forward or backward, and their eyes were sited so they could see sideways.

Now, that sounds like a damn good Saturday night date. Especially the heels part, they must have been damn fine dancers. I mean with feet like that they could boogie.

I bet going to Theosophy church was a hoot!

[Bunny]

1. I read footnotes.

I rarely read endnotes.

[short bus president]

10. indeed

end notes are for lazy authors or piss poor printers. Footnotes are useful, and RIGHT FRIGGIN' THERE when you need them.

[Shanty Oilish]

2. The day I pass over anything on the page...

...will indeed be the day I pass over. :)

[greatauntoftriplets]

3. Hot damn! Just think of what I miss by not reading endnotes and footnotes

Now I want to know how she knew they were hermaphrodites. I can understand the 15 feet tall, the brown skin, four eyes and third eyes, protruding heels and all. But how did she check out the mixed gender? Did they walk around bare nekkid?

I think you need to get out more if that is your idea of a damn good Saturday night date. Or did you think they had rockers on their heels???? LOL.

Edited, rather belatedly, to fix stupid spelling error.

[soothsayer]

4. Read Gibbons' footnotes in "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"

Woof! You'll get a whole sex ed course...!

Plus you MUST read the footnotes if you're trying to make it thru that very strange book, "House of Leaves"---making sense of it DEPENDS on it...

[greatauntoftriplets]

5. Damn!

Why didn't you tell me that when I was 9 years old and wanted to know?????

[catzies]

8. As a matter of fact I am right now!

That book is on my coffee table, within reach as I sit with a :beer:

[Maddy McCall]

6. Never! We historians call that "mining for sources"

And we all go look at the same source material to draw sometimes-similar, sometimes-stark-different conclusions.

Notes are what it's all about...notes either accent or detract from an author's credibility.

[LearnedHand]

7. I am SUCH a total geek!

When I was in elementary and secondary school, the teachers all said I needed to read everything, cover-to-cover, even the publication and title page. Since I was scared of my teachers, and I assumed their wisdom had been carried from god by the angels, I took them at their word.

It is AMAZINGLY surprising how much we can learn by reading these things. I've talked with people who'd read the same books I had but had completely missed some thesis or other major point that was explained in the Intro, fer crissakes!

Thanks for this posting. I think I'll print it and take it to my students to read.

:yourock:

[1monster]

9. "Never give up, never surrender!" -- Commander Peter Quincy Taggart

One of my all time favorite movies. :D

[roughsatori]

11. I always read foot and end notes ( I even read acknowledgments)

If the book includes a glossary, I check that out even when I know all the definitions--I just check to see the language they use to define the terms. And then there are the newer editions with the old and then the newer introductions, and occasionally followed by a text on the history of the publication. I am logocentric, possibly a logophiliac.

[Dudley_DUright]

12. Funny you should mention footnotes

I was reading Al Franken's book today, and he had a really long footnote with lots of of numbers and technical details and at the end he comments "I can't believe you are still reading this footnote". LOL! :-)

[KCDem]

13. theosophy--I did a paper on that once!

Have you heard of Feodorov? Damn, one whacked-out weirdo!

[Fenris]

14. Never skip them

Critical information can sometimes be found in foot and end notes.

[starroute]

15. Book on footnotes -- looks interesting

All I know about this is the description in the Daedalus Books catalog:

The Devil's Details: A History of Footnotes by Chuck Zerby

Footnotes, according to Chuck Zerby, are people, characters, heroes -- even sexual beings. These heroes' adventures are followed from their struggle for acceptance in the 17th century, through their predominance in 18th- and 19th-century literature and scholarship, to the undeserved belittlement they have received in the 20th. Publishers and scholars have employed them, of course, but also poets and novelists. In a new world of Internet and hypertext links, the book makes an extensively footnoted clarion call to preserve the form from the black hole of virtual reality.

"Footnotes are a site of limitless drama, a sort of anteroom where authors go to hash out with others or with themselves matters that are too controversial, too incidental, or even too risque to be included in the text.... In this short volume--festooned, of course, with a rococo profusion of bottom-of-the-page diversions and digressions... Zerby mounts a spirited defense of a little-loved and endangered species." --Boston Sunday Globe

Published at $24.00. Available for $6.98 at http://www.salebooks.com


For myself, I have to confess that where footnotes are concerned I am often tempted to read only the good parts, and sometimes skip those that are in languages I do not know or that consist entirely of arguments with writers I have never heard of. On the other hand, I have been convinced for many years that authors regularly conceal the secrets of the universe in the densest and most unpromising of their footnotes, and sometimes think regretfully that if I had been more perseverent with the ones I skipped I would have long ago attained true enlightenment.