The Devil's Details: A History of Footnotes

✍ Scribed by Zerby, Chuck

• Book ID: 107803553
• Publisher: Touchstone
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 190 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9781416587330

✦ Synopsis

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...