The Devil's Details Read Online Free PDF Page A

Lanchester, “
Be Interesting
!” London Review of Books , 6 July 2000, p. 6.
    19. Ibid., note.
    20. Ibid., note to first note. Of course, it might be the LRB editors’ doing; they may have seized the chance for a free plug for an upcoming is sue. Money talks, and even The New Yorker , which normally keeps its page bottoms immaculate, may listen: An ad in a recent issue asserts: “Money management is what we do.” And a large, easily visible, red asterisk floats above the period; it leads the reader to the next page and below a photo of a white-haired Odysseus type hugging a surfboard. The note says: “Technically speaking, we can also make dreams come true.” See
The New Yorker
, 12 February 2001, pp. 14, 15.
    21. Ibid., first note.
    22. Ibid., note.
    23. Ibid.
    24. Jenny Lyn Bader, “
Forget Footnotes. Hyperlink
.” The New York Times , Sunday, 16 July 2000, Section 4 (Week in Review), p. 1.
    25. Ibid.
    26. Ibid.
    27. Joseph Conrad (no date),
Heart of Darkness
[Originally published in Blackwood Magazine in 1899, February, March, and April. Subsequently published in 1902 in Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Stories .] Available: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/csicseri.com [10 February 2001]. For the most part the annotation’s format follows the suggestions of Xia Li and Nancy B. Crane, Electronic Styles: A Handbook for Citing Electronic Information (Medford, N.J.: Information Today, 1996). Nothing shows the growth and seriousness of the hyperlink challenge to the footnote more clearly than a comparison of this recent edition of Electronic Styles with an earlier one. A 1993 edition ran to 65 pages; the 1996 edition needed 213 pages.
    28.Philip M. Davis and Suzanne Cohen, “
The Effect of the Web on Undergraduate Citation Behavior 1996-1999
,” available: http://www.people.cornell. edu/pages/pmd8.com / [14 February 2001]. The article should also be available in vol. 52, no. 4 (15 February 2001), of The Journal of the American Association for Information Science . This author wishes to thank Nancy Thompson for bringing this article to his attention as well as for her many other helpful e-mailed suggestions—and yes, this author, for all his worries about the Web, appreciates its convenience and speed.
    29. Personal communication (e-mail) to this writer, available only on nonvellum paper insecurely filed.
    30. Personal communication (e-mail) to this writer.
    Note: Readers desiring a bibliography to this work should look for my next book, A History of Bibliographies .

* An adequate history will be a humanistic history: one that does not restrict the footnote to the bare-bones function of referring the reader to cited material. Such a restricted view of the footnote is as inadequate as would be the notion that an X ray of the human body reveals the full import of the human being.

* Academics and workmen may lack understanding of each other. Every so often I have heard one faculty member complain to another about the amount of time custodians or electricians or security guards or—less often—student dishwashers spend just standing around “doing nothing,” this while standing around waiting for a meeting or a class or lunch to start. It seems to escape them that work requiring hands and backs also can require the planning and coordinated efforts that necessitate standing around and talking. Workmen, of course, often show a reciprocal disdain for academics. Talking to students, lecturing, writing and reading, staring off into space in search of an idea do not look like “real work.” I sometimes tell them that a study once compared occupations and calorie expenditure; writers proved to have used up more calories per hour than longshoremen. Disbelief is the usual reaction and, because I cannot “access” the study, the disbelief usually remains. Both sides misunderstand each other’s work, I think, but as academics write much more about workers