If a footnote is sufficiently lengthy or deemed sufficiently important to the subject matter of the text, the author should consider incorporating the footnote into the text.

Tell that to Terry Pratchett…

If there’s more than a page or so in the text, you aren’t looking at a note anyway – you’re looking at an appendix.

Suppose the source material is a book. You might have both the book you’re reading and the book that’s used as source material with you.

Anyway, the endnotes aren’t totally useless even if you can’t look up the source material RIGHT THEN. By looking at the endnotes you can see that the material is sourced to something, and you may be able to see how reliable/tendentious the source is (is it “Coulter, A.”?)

And having to switch back and forth between the book and the supporting website sounds about a million billion times worse than having to flip back and forth between the main text and the end of the book.

A website does this nicely. And these days, it seems hard to imagine a location where you have access to the source material being cited, but no access to a computer.

As regards substantive notes, the standard conventions of footnotes (small text at the bottom of the page) make it clear to uninterested readers that this is material that can be skipped, while making it easy for interested readers to see them in context.

137. i.e., tender but airy (also, a conventional pseudo-etymology for mulier, cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 1, l. 4, et passim)

138. No. (Thot not.)

“Like the toilet,” Grafton argues, “the footnote enables one to deal with ugly tasks in private; like the toilet it is tucked genteely away – often, in recent years, not even at the bottom of the page but at the end of the book. Out of sight, and even out of mind, seems exactly where so banal a device belongs.”

He concludes:

“In a brilliant passage, Gibbon dissects the five volumes of the Origines Guelficae: ‘The hands of several workmen are apparent; the bold and original spirt of Leibnitz, the crude erudition and hasty conjectures of Eccard, the useful annotations of Gruber, and the crtical disquisitions of Scheid.’ [footnote 54] One could say much the same – if one could write such sentences – of the footnote. A palimpsest, it reveal on examination reserach techniques framed in the Renaissance, critical rules first stated during the Scientific Revolution, the irony of Gibbon, and the empathy of Ranke.”

I loves me a footnote and hates me an endnote, for reasons articulated by others.

(There’s an essay on footnotes in fiction that mentions this, which I found somehow the other day by searching CT for references to Gray, but HM itself doesn’t seem to be mentioned on this blog.—And while we’re mentioning footnotes in fiction, what about The Makepeace Experiment by Abram Tertz, in which the narrator gets into an argument with the footnotes and—well, that would be a spoiler!)

Kevin Keith, excellent point re: popular consumption.

Conventional wisdom in publishing is that footnotes scare away readers, but I say that readers who are afraid of FOOTnotes are not about to look something up in an ENDnote, so as a rule of thumb if the author wants something read it had better be in the text (in parentheses, perhaps).

Footnotes were phased out when publishers got away from galley proofs that were pasted up in pages after first proofreading. If you page the book in Quark and make changes that cause text to shift from one page to another, it messes up the footnotes. A book with a lot of notes may have to be repaged after every proofreading. Hence, endnotes.

I don’t mind endnotes that are citing sources of information. (You want authors to not cite sources of information?) But I agree that comments should either be in the text or in FOOTnotes.

A readerly argument for footnotes (suggested by Parfit’s remark on R&P) is that most books really worth reading aren’t really “read” until you’ve gone through multiple passes (a shorter version of this phenomenon is—quite movingly—found in Andre Dubus’ essay, ‘A Hemingway Story’). As such, I like to first orient myself to the author’s overall mental world by checking out endnotes/bibliography, then do a quick read that ignores footnotes/endnotes to get a sense of where the author is going within that world, and only on a kind of third reading do I get to the author’s equivocations/elaborations in the endnotes. I prefer endnotes over footnotes for precisely the reason that it’s easier to avoid getting tripped up early over some point whose charitable interpretation/role in overall argument may not yet be available to me.