I was recently compelled to use footnotes. I don’t mean the clever asides that capable writers sometimes utilize to spice up subjects by making points off topic. No, I mean the kind with author, date, title, city, publisher, page number. I deal with footnotes daily—it’s an occupational hazard. As a recovering academic I’m trying to get away from using footnotes on everything from grocery lists to daily meeting reminders. Cite your sources! That’s the kind of rhetoric that’s pounded into the heads of bright young people, often preventing them from learning to think for themselves. At this stage of my life a footnote is more often trying to find someone who agrees with what I’ve observed for myself. Hmm, did anyone ever say that before? If so, where?
My concern goes down to the level of cities. Yes, cities. Standard format requires you cite the city in which a book was published. This ridiculous pre-internet artifact had a purpose originally, but I have worked for two international publishers and I can tell you two related, and perhaps contradictory points: employees can tell which office a book is from: New York or London. And unless you work for said publisher there is almost no way for you to know. So if a publisher has offices in a dozen cities, you need to write a dozen of them in your footnote. Does this sound like a rational thing to do? Don’t get me wrong—it’s important, very important to cite the publisher. But it’s not like there are a ton of presses around with the exact same name.
There’s a move among some reference experts (refperts, if you like) to do away with the city in footnotes. It’s a reasonable guess that Cambridge University Press is pretty widely recognized. And that Cambridge is located in Cambridge. Or course, there’s a Cambridge in Massachusetts, and I hear there’s a university there as well. In any case, if you don’t know where a publisher’s located, there’s a remarkable invention called the internet where you can look it up! Pedanticism comes naturally to academics, I suppose. Had I not been one I would probably have had no reason to write such an anal post as this. Still, there’s a larger point: when is one able simply to assert what one knows? I frankly don’t remember the page on which I read most facts I point out in my writing. Often I notice them myself and recognize them as facts when there’s good, solid evidence. Of course, I really should footnote that. If I can remember in which city the appropriately named Random House is located.