Songs of experience have become songs of innocence. University presses traditionally specialized in bringing out books in which a thick overgrowth of footnotes covered, and sometimes even overwhelmed, the pages they belonged to. But even university press editors have brought out their pruning shears and begun to cut. But trade publishers take little interest in such titles, since they usually sell only a few thousand copies. Subsidized learned presses have rushed in where free-market angels feared to tread.
Pedantry is out, essays are in.
Footnotes, after all, have served as the butt of countless jokes. Noel Coward notoriously remarked that turning from a main text to a footnote is very much like ceasing to make love in order to go downstairs and answer the door. Yet once a brush with extinction loomed, this unloved literary device found more articulate defenders than did the blue whale or the whooping crane. As usual, however, the blare of the Anglo-American publicity machine did more to drown out than to further serious discussion of the subject on which it had seized. Yet he did not, and naturally could not, treat the issues exhaustively.