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EndnotesAugust 09, 2007 Most of the books I edit are nonfiction -- history, biography, political science, contemporary issues, and the like -- which means that most of them have endnotes, footnotes, and/or bibliographies of some sort. A thousand-page manuscript might include 150 pages of notes and 40 pages of references. Page after page of names, titles, publication data, and page numbers, interrupted occasionally with a complete sentence of two: the brain glazes over just thinking about it. Sometimes, though, endnotes come as a relief after three weeks of untangling sentences and sussing out the author's intentions. With endnotes and bibliographies, you haul out the applicable style guide -- mine is usually The Chicago Manual of Style, currently in its 15th edition -- lay it open on your lap, and hit cruise control. The job I just finished was an anthology on constitutional law aimed at a general, i.e., non-lawyerly, readership. It comprised 12 articles, each with between 30 and 95 endnotes and each accompanied by a bibliographical essay that surveyed the field and made suggests for further reading. The references included books, academic journals, and -- this being a book about the law -- gazillions of case citations. My very first professional proofreading job was a weekly newspaper for lawyers, but that was 30 years ago. At first glance case citations look like expressions in Cyrillic, Sanskrit, or mathematics. "384 U.S. 457 (1966)," for instance, is Miranda v. Arizona, which is where Miranda warnings come from. (Have you had yours today?) Some are more complicated, like "304 F. Supp. 2d 1027 (N.D. Ill. 2004)," which has to do with reparations for slavery. After some brushing up, I could identify obvious typos and missing information, all the while feeling a little awed that some people speak this lingo day in, day out, and would have no trouble picking the right volume off the shelf and turning straight to In re African-American Slave Descendants Litigation. And that's my point. To copyeditors, including yours truly, endnotes and references are often a major pain in the tush, but when you get past the myriad picky-bitch details (some of which, of course, are wrong) they're a wonder -- a host of wonders. The article or book that gets a mere line in the notes and perhaps a short mention in the text was once a new work. It absorbed weeks, months, and maybe years of its author's life. Quite possibly it has endnotes, footnotes, and a reference list of its own. Considered in isolation, some seem rather esoteric, boring even: why did anyone bother to write about that, or to collect half a dozen volumes of so-and-so's law papers? In the endnotes all is revealed: these are the footsteps my authors walked on, the ladders they stood on, the bridges they crossed the chasm on. As endnotes are to a book, so legal cases are to the country -- the footsteps we've walked in, the bridges we're still building. There are plenty of judges out there who've got their heads up their butts, and it's entirely possible that two or three of them are on the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice may be blindfolded, but human legal systems generally aren't: they see who has money, and who has clout. At the same time -- there's something magnificent about those laws and legal cases, tatted and interwoven and cross-stitched into a fabric that goes back to the founding of this republic and then further back, into the mists of the English common law. It's our ballast -- it slows us down for sure, but it also keeps us from blowing way off course. Our history is in the endnotes; throw them overboard and we're alone against the hurricane. Some of you are already saying, "Oh God, here it comes -- she's going to quote that Thomas More thing again." Damn right. Here it is, Thomas More and his son-in-law, William Roper, from Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons. Earlier More has compared the laws of England to the trees in a great forest. Now Roper says that King Henry VIII has erred so grievously that he's forfeited the benefit of law. More disagrees.
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