While some of my colleagues are currently improving their backhand or in pursuit of the perfect bottle of rosé, I’m whiling away my summer hours ransacking my files in search of the elusive footnote. You see, I’ve come to that point in the writing process where I need to account for myself. It’s footnote time!
Citing chapter and verse -- Jenna Weissman Joselit, A Perfect Fit (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001), p. 7 -- is easier said than done. You would think that after so many years of writing and publishing, I’d have gotten the hang of it by now, or, at the very least, that I would have learned my lesson and immediately filed away a footnote once I insinuated someone else’s bon mot among my own.
If only. Sacrificing accountability to the all-important “flow,” I kept writing away rather than stopping to take note. Besides, I told myself, everything, from the index cards tidily arrayed in neat, little boxes to the Xeroxes housed in different color folders, was clearly marked and well within reach. When the moment was right, all I had to do was to pluck the appropriate source from its container and the deed was done. No muss, no fuss.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. There’s nothing but muss and fuss as I upend the contents of one folder after another in search of a newspaper article from 1895 that I’m sure -- absolutely, positively, unhesitatingly sure -- that I Xeroxed or printed out. ‘Turns out I was mistaken. Instead of creating a hard copy, I had actually taken notes on said article, whose contents were now to be found, and fading fast, on an index card, one of several hundred in the black box that looks awfully like the 12 similar black boxes housing the other handwritten notes I had assembled over the many years on which I’ve worked on this project.
Repeat this procedure 20, 30, even 40 times a day and it’s no wonder that at its close, my digs look as if they’ve been hit hard by a tornado and I’m in desperate need of a drink (perhaps a glass of that rosé).
But I soldier on and keep at it, day in and day out, bearing in mind, as Anthony Grafton reminds us in his salute to the footnote, that these little, hard-won nuggets of information are what binds one historian to another and the past to the present.
