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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 May 2014
Visual strategy begins on the first page. The most pretentious form of first page differentation is the “lead-in” quotation whereby the author prefaces the main body of the text with a quote from an esteemed scholar, a famous decision, or some other prestigious source. … The objective of the “lead-in” quote is to spark immediate attention with a titillating example of erudition, humor, or impertinence… Ideally the lead-in quote should be obscure—oriental sources are recommended—and should not have a substantive link to the subject matter of the article. … This technique can generate guilt among readers who suspect the game but lack the nerve to speak out.
His books positively clank and groan under the weight of apparatus. Very good it is too.
As indicated in the first part of this paper, I adopt a generous definition of “annotation” in this discussion. There the traditional forms, footnotes, and other textual apparatus were discussed. Here I want to concentrate on a number of forms of annotation that are not usually treated under that rubric. Included (in roughly the order in which they are likely to appear in a given work) are titles, tables of contents, prefaces, epigraphs, graphs and charts, maps, quoted matter, facsimiles, appendices, glossaries, bibliographies, and indexes. Each of these is an occasion—and an opportunity—to provide access to the text, to the author's own sources, or to the author's mind. While every work will not use all of these, certain of them (prefaces, tables of contents, bibliographies, and indexes) should be a part of every substantial scholarly study.
1 Austin, Arthur D., “Footnotes as Product Differentiation,” Vanderbilt Law Review 40 (1987), 1144.Google Scholar
2 Keegan, John, “The Trial of David Irving—and My Part in His Downfall,” The Daily Telegraph (London) (early edition 12 04 2000), 28Google Scholar, quoted in Evans, Richard, Lying About Hitler (New York, 2001), 241.Google Scholar
3 To my knowledge these are all fictional titles, hence quotation marks rather than italics.
4 A Comparative Study of Thirty City-State Cultures, ed. Mogens Herman Hansen, has a total of about one hundred maps, plans, drawings, tables, etc., but no listing of these in the table of contents. Another compilation in large format contains 22 essays totaling 557 pages but has no index no consolidated bibliogrpahy, no list of the hundreds of drawing and photographs, and a one-page preface: Essays on Syria in the Iron Age, ed. Bunnens, Guy (Louvain, 2000).Google Scholar
5 For articles, the first paragraph or two, or a lengthy first footnote, can serve as mini-preface
6 The art, science, and gamesmanship of acknowledging are discussed in, for example, Ben-Ari, E., “On Acknowledgments in Ethnographies,” Journal of Archaeological Research 43(1987), 63–84Google Scholar; Cronin, Blaise, “Let the Credits Roll: A Preliminary Examination of the Role Played by Mentors and Trusted Assessors in Disciplinary Formation,” Journal of Documentation 47(1991), 227–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Caesar, Terri, “On Acknowledgments,” New Orleans Review 19/1 (Spring 1992), 85–94Google Scholar; Cronin, Blaise, Mackenzie, Gail, and Rubio, Lourdes, “The Norms of Acknowledgement in Four Humanities and Social Science Disciplines,” Journal of Documentation 49(1993), 29–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and most enjoyably Pinck, Dan, “Let Me Count the Ways,” American Scholar 69(2000), 101–04.Google Scholar Ben-Ari treats acknowledgments as, among other things and fairly often, forms of encoded criticism.
7 I could not be more sincere when I thank the staff of our library's interlibrary loan department for their critical contribution to all my work, but because of the ambivalent nature of acknowledgments, only I can know this; they must be satisfied with believing me.
8 Despite disagreeing with some of my arguments;” although I disagree with several points previously made by;” or similar locutions would seem to suffice
9 Finck, “Let Me Count the Ways,” mentions a 634-page book with 388 acknowledgments, a 600-page book with 633 acknowledgments, and a 603-page book with 795 acknowledgments. The last was Kitty Kelley's “unauthorized” biography of Nancy Reagan, wihch no doubt helps to explains the overdone appeal to authority. For more examples, mostly from cultural studies, see Bauerlein, Mark, “A Thanking Task,” Times Literary Supplement (9 11 2001).Google Scholar Bauerlein's is a suitably jaundiced view: “[n]obody cares about the product, so the Acknowledgements shift attention to the labour that went into it and the people who helped it on its way.”
10 Woodward, Bob, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 13.Google Scholar This type of incognitohood is not unusual in works deriving from the type of fieldwork familiar to Africanists.
11 E.g., Heilige, David, “Mis/Adventures in Mis/Quoting,” Journal of Scholarly Publishing 22(2001), 123–36Google Scholar, and “Letter to the Editor,” Journal of Scholarly Publishing 33(2001/2002), 122Google Scholar, hoisting Henige by his own petard.
12 Aryan, K.C. and Aryan, Subhashini, The Aryans: History of Vedic Period (New Delhi, 1998), 125.Google Scholar
13 For a discussion of the dispiriting number of ways to fail this test see Monmonier, Mark S., How to Lie With Maps (Chicago, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and other works by the same author, including the latest, Bushtnanders and Bullwinkles: How Politicians Manipulate Electronic Maps and Census Data to Win Elections (Chicago, 2001).Google Scholar
14 E.g., Warfare in Chinese History, ed. van de Ven, Hans (Leiden, 2000).Google Scholar
15 That is, such a map might fail to provide information of the growth of the Sultanate, the political disparities among its parts, the correct locations of all the points shown, or be of an inappropriate scale, but scale must be provided.
16 International stock markets were universally described as “volatile” in 2001, but most of the volatility took place within only about 10 percent of the markets' values. Thus a scale showing the entire 100 percent would not look nearly as volatile as one that began just short of the volatility zone—more like a hacksaw than a crosscut saw.
17 For arguments along these lines see Henige, David, “Counting the Encounter: the Pernicious Appeal of Verisimilitude,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 2(1993), 325–61Google Scholar
18 For one example of the misleading effects of an inappropriate scale, see Schulze, Peter and Mealy, Jack, “Population Growth, Technology, and Tricky Graphs,” American Scientist 89(05-06 2001), 209–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and exchange of correspondence, American Scientist 89(07-08 2001), 292–93.Google Scholar
19 Even a page or two of an early printed edition might help alert readers to transcription issues.
20 The only occasion I know that this happened (no doubt there are others) is Wilks, Ivor, Asante in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1975), xvi.Google Scholar
21 E.g., Berger, Dieter A., “‘Damn the Mottoe’: Scott and the Epigraph,” Anglia 100 (1982), 373–96Google Scholar; Manning, Peter J, “Wordsworth's Intimations Ode and Its Epigraphs,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 82 (1983), 526–40Google Scholar; Hamalian, Linda, “Other Voices, Other Looms: Richard Wright's Use of Epigraphs in Two Novels,” Obsidian II: Black Literature in Review 3/3 (Winter 1988), 72–88Google Scholar; Bowen, Deborah, “The Riddler Riddled: Reading the Epigraphs in John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman,” Journal of Narrative Technique 25 (1995), 67–90Google Scholar; MacDougall, Hugh C., “The Cooper Epigraphs: Sources of the Epigraphs in the Novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Susan Fenimore Cooper,” James Fenimore Cooper Society Miscellaneous Papers 12 (1999), 1–28Google Scholar; and, most interestingly, Higdon, David L., “George Eliot and the Art of the Epigraph,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 25 (1970/1971), 127–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
22 Thus the same result, and perhaps the same cause, as specialized classics collections in libraries accessible only to a chosen few, again usually classicists, by key access.
23 Finkelstein, Israel and Silberman, Neil Asher, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (New York, 2001), 356.Google Scholar
24 Dever, William G. in Biblical Archaeology Review 27/2 (03-04 2001), 60–62.Google Scholar
25 (London, 2001)
26 See his In Defence of History (London, 1999)Google Scholar, a critique of ‘postmodern’ historiography.
27 Bellesiles, Michael A., Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (New York, 2000), 455.Google Scholar Bellesiles has since been charged with more serious lapses in his use of evidence. For this see especially William and Mary Quarterly 59/1(2002).Google Scholar
28 Online 22/3(05-06 1998), 9–10.Google Scholar
29 Dobyns, Henry, Native American Historical Demography: a Critical Bibliography (Bloomington, IN, 1976).Google Scholar
30 The “Goldhagen Effect”: History, Memory, Nazism—Facing the German Past, ed. Eley, Geoff (Ann Arbor, 2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
31 Goldhagen, Daniel J., Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996).Google Scholar
32 See especially the extended annotation to Bartov, Omer, “Reception and Perception: Goldhagen's Holocaust and the World” in Goldhagen Effect, 33–87Google Scholar
33 The Hyksos: New Historical and Archaeological Perspectives, ed. Oren, Eliezer D. (Philadelphia, 1997).Google Scholar
34 I e-mailed the Museum asking about their justification but have received no reply.
35 Thatcher, Virginia S., Indexes: Writing, Editing, Production (Lanham MD, 1995), viiiGoogle Scholar
36 Ibid., 101.
37 Natural Catastrophes During Bronze Age Civilisations: Archaeological, Geological, Astronomical, and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Peiser, Benny J., Palmer, Trevor, and Bailey, Mark E. (Oxford, 1998).Google Scholar
38 See, e.g., Frame, Andrea, “Indexers and Publishers: Their Views on Indexers and Indexing,” The Indexer 20 (10 1996), 58–63Google Scholar; (April 1997), 131-34.
39 There is some evidence that reviewers seldom care about missing indexes enough to mention them, perhaps because their obligation to read a book from beginning to end renders an index momentarily superfluous. Whatever the reason, it is uncommon to read in a review criticism of a work specifically for lacking an index. Clark's, AndrewFrom Frontier to Backwater (Lanham, MD, 1999)Google Scholar, for example, was vigorously, if passingly, criticized for this in an online (H-Africa@h-net.msu.edu) review (where words are not doled out), but the absence is not noted in reviews in printed journals (e.g., IJAHS 33(2000], 134-35; Choice [May 2000], 1702). Members of the Society of American Baseball Research have embarked on an initiative to index recent works on the sports that need it and to mount these on SABR's website.
40 E.g., Bell, Hazel K., “Reading for Fine Indexing,” Scholarly Publishing 23 (1991/1992), 115–21Google Scholar; Kleinberg, Ira, “For Want of an Alphabetical Index,” Indexer 20(04 1997), 156–59Google Scholar
41 E.g., Sweeney, Marvin A., King Josiah of Judah: the Lost Messiah of Israel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
42 But see Hartley, James, “Where is the Address? Give Readers and Writers a Chance by Providing Postal Details,” Social Studies of Science 31(2001), 627–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
43 Velikovsky, Immanuel, Worlds in Collision (New York, 1950)Google Scholar and numerous editions since, as well as other works of Velikovsky and his imitators carrying such arguments forward.
44 A slight variation of this technique is abroad today, which tries to tie dendro-chronological evidence, reports in the historical record, and cometary near misses together. For the moment the locus classicus of this is Baillie, Mike, Front Exodus to Arthur: Catastrophic Encounters With Comets (London, 1999).Google Scholar Baillie is far from practicing note proliferation, however.
45 Ibid., vii.
46 Mediterranean Peoples in Transition, Thirteenth to Early Tenth Century BCE, ed. Gitin, Seymour, Mazar, Amihai, and Stern, Ephraim (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1998).Google Scholar
47 Ibid, 152.
