In response to my invitation to send questions, Albert in Indiana asked about the relative merits of endnotes and footnotes in books. Mr. Meyer prefers footnotes, which allow him to “converse with ...

Annotations have traditionally been no more than mere footnotes in the history of fiction, providing information that supplements the main story. That is why when James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake was ...

Answering the question, 'what do footnotes do?' many scholars would argue instrumentally, stating that they document references, accumulate authority, and demonstrate scholarship. Yet to a reader, the ...