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.
.. 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.
.. 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.