Do you - Indeed, Can you - Open your Windows?

I've been thinking a lot about footnotes lately.   Both my present assignment from WEBBS, and the last one I worked on, involved them.  Indeed, the earlier one was exclusively devoted to them.  It was a project that had been completed some years ago, but now a different book had been found that included footnotes, and it was decided that these could prove very useful.  So a new project was commissioned to add these to the original output, which proved very fiddley.

The present work is based on a summary, rather than a standard scripture and doesn't easily fit into the software that we use.  As a workaround, the references are required to be added to every single footnote: a task that falls to me, along with the rest of my editing work.

So, what are these little 'ornamentations' that are so critical?  I like to think of them rather as windows.  You can ignore them, draw the curtains and live quite contentedly in a darkened room without them.  Or you can look through them to enjoy the scenery outside, or even throw them wide open and let in the fresh air to enrich your enjoyment of life.  Sometimes windows are of limited use, as if opening onto an alleyway so all you can see is the brick-wall on the other side or, worse, they might be darkened by a layer of grime that requires the attention of a window-cleaner, be this human or chemical.

Footnotes can be frustrating.  Like the windows that need cleaning, I've found some old books most annoying when the footnotes are written in the original language, with which I'm not familiar, or even in a different alphabet (e.g. Greek).  It suggests that the book wasn't written to be read by 'ordinary' people, but was published merely as a 'scholarly work'.

Footnotes can wander and be renamed as 'end-notes'.  Occasionally, there might be a whole chapter of these at the end of the book and you need to keep a bookmark there to read the interesting anecdotes referred to in the main text.  More often these simply provide a bibliography, or list of sources that the author has drawn upon in compiling his work.  In this case, at least you know that they can be ignored so far as adding to the plot is concerned.

You can tell that I like historical books, and the sort of footnotes I really appreciate are the ones that overflow onto the next page, and relate something more about a character in the book's subject matter ... something that is, probably, quite irrelevant to the theme but is, of itself, an interesting anecdote, a juicy tale, or maybe identifies someone relatively obscure in the present consideration as a key player in later life.

I'm very pleased that my new home is double-glazed.  However, most of the windows have only small openable panes at the top, and there are times when it would be nice to have a big casement window that could be - as I put it above - thrown wide-open so as to enjoy the clean fresh air to the full.  The same could be said of footnotes, they can add so much to the enjoyment of a book, but this potential is often curtailed by obscurity, inaccessibility, or just plain irrelevance.