The Devil's Details (18 page)

^*
Collateral
, of course, has several meanings. This reader assumes Amis's use is synonymous with “accompanying,” “auxiliary,” “additional,” “secondary,” and synonymous with each of those, not just one of them. It seems unlikely he could mean “collateral” in any narrower sense; that would make him a much less sophisticated annotator than is plausible given the other literary skills he demonstrates.

^*
The one unquestionable Eggers footnote is part of what amounts to a book promotion. The text offers to send five dollars to the first two hundred readers of
A Heartbreaking Work
on receiving a proof of purchase. The note then declares the obvious and rubs it in: “It should go without saying that if you've checked this book out from the library, or are reading it in paperback, you are much, much too late.” See Dave Eggers,
A Hearbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
(New York, London, Sydney, and Singapore: Simon & Schuster, 2000), p. xxv. Even now, in this time of escalating commercialization, a time when Madison Avenue types eye lustfully any blank space on television or magazines or the Internet or popcorn bags or public buses or U.S. Mail boxes or T-shirts, pants, and computer floppy disks or … and so on and so forth; even now the thought that the footnote might become a billboard strikes this consumer as absurd. And yet see also above, note 20, page 142.

^*
The thing that just now tilted your head downward or got you to adjust the book page upward. Ms. Bader herself mixes to good effect the book footnote and the hypertext reference in her article. For example: “Small children who would normally not read books with footnotes until secondary school know their way around bright blue hyperlinks.”
Hyperlinks
is indeed printed in a pleasantly bright blue and underlined in blue in the hypertext manner. The finger itches to click-click a mouse. Instead a reference mark beside the blue leads to the bottom of the article and a pleasant if conventional note: “Hyperlinks may lead to lovely places unless the links themselves have expired. Then they lea
error messages.”
* A teen's eyes, of course, might judge the type more favorably than this writer's eyes.

^*
A teen's eyes, of course, might judge the type more favorably than this writer's eyes.

^*
The report, however, is supposed to be available on microfilm, which simply reinforces the remarks made below about the need for storage redundancy.

^*
See chapter 6, “A Poetic Interlude II.”

^*
This quotation has been “translated” in part. In its original it read: “A man wold not thinke that he had devoured so much payne as he has susteined.” A judgment call: I judged that
wold
and
thinke
would not interrupt the easy flow of a reader, even one new to the Elizabethan era's ad hoc spellings, whereas
payne
and
susteined
might. And I did not wish to distract attention from the artful word
devoured
; the archbishop wants to believe Jugge so devout he was ravenous for the painstaking work that went into the Bishops' Bible. Let us hope so.

^*
Between 1560 and 1611 there were more than 120 separate editions of the Geneva Bible compared with twenty-two for the Bishops' Bible and only seven for the Great Bible (Henry the Eighth's vain effort to unite his citizens behind a single version of God's word). See Evelyn B. Tribble:
Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England
(Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1993), pp. 31-2.

^*
Ibid., p. 23. One may suspect that Henry the Eighth might not have been sincere in his quest for orderliness—just as one may suspect Jerry Springer is not always unhappy when his guests raise their voices or their fists. Public insincerity was not unknown to the king; he banned brothels (unsuccessfully), yet he is reputed to have hung a sign over some of the palace's rooms proclaiming
MY WHORES' ROOMS
—or something to that effect. See Gamini Salgado,
The Elizabethan Underworld
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992), p. 41.