Books!

I love books. Not just any books, mind you. But the ones you pick up and immediately fall in love with; the kind you know you were supposed to come across, and which were meant specifically for you to read them, exclaiming with great delight all the while.

I am currently reading The Devil's Detail's: A History of Footnotes, by Chuck Zerby. I found said book next to another book on footnotes, and picked both of them up to read (footnotes are instrumental to my thesis).

What are some reasons I was destined to find, read, and enjoy this book?

- It contains the following text:
It is true that when Grafton's story reaches the eighteenth century, the seductiveness of that century's footnotes moves him to say that 'footnotes burgeoned and propagaged like branches and leaves in a William Morris wallpaper.' A lovely comparison that is...succeeded by a scholar who uses a footnote the way 'the hockey-masked villain in an American horror film uses a chain saw: to dismember his opponents, leaving their gory limbs scattered across the landscape'.

- It contains the idea that footnotes are "not...steel cables woven into a gigantic interconnection of meaning". This idea has resonances with the poetry that will be in the thesis, the structural/subject matter of Octavia (you'll have to sign into Amazon to access the text directly, unfortunately), and directly addresses the structural concerns in my essay. Everything I will be dealing with, in one wonderfully forthright and beautiful sentence.

- It is "published by arrangement with Invisible Cities Press."

Footnote that, baby!