DISCOVERIES

The Devil’s Details

A History of Footnotes

Chuck Zerby

Touchstone: 150 pp., $12 paper

“The Devil’s Details,” Chuck Zerby’s defense of footnotes, now out in paperback, is both hilarious and instructive. Endangered, if not extinct, footnotes are an important addition, Zerby argues, to nonfiction, fiction and even poetry. Their main job is “to interrupt. Simply interrupt.” Though the form may have been diluted, and its integrity compromised, Zerby insists that the footnote “humanizes scholarship.”

Zerby locates the first footnote in the Bishop’s Bible, printed in 1568 by Richard Jugge, senior printer to the Queen of England. He goes humming through English literature pointing out his favorite footnote users and a few scandals. There’s Alexander Pope, Herman Melville, James Joyce and John Updike. One begins to think of the footnote as the original crucible of all irony.

“A text sometimes is something only a scholar can love,” Zerby writes, like a man with a fetish for Ferragamo shoes, “a footnote, however, is like a blind date, threatening and exciting, dreary occasionally but often entertaining. And a footnote does not require or expect a long commitment.” In his final chapter, he describes the footnote’s new home in the virtual world, the hyperlink: “[T]he footnote, when evicted from the book by publishers and lazy scholars, is not to be out on the street. No, it is to move into a nice tract house on the Web.”

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Cad

Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor

Rick Marin

Hyperion: 284 pp., $23.95

One really shouldn’t look at Rick Marin’s picture on the flap, his purple shirt and stylish glasses, but it’s hard not to. He doesn’t look like a Neanderthal, but he sure claims to understand the mind of the caveman.

It’s hard to call him a cad when he’s already called himself one and proudly. And to his credit, he does have some fine, Sedaris-style cad lines: “Dating is a salesman’s game. One in ten is a good month. Most of the time, you feel like Willy Loman.” He also has his own moral cad code: “A man doesn’t go sniffing around other men’s wives.” Marin plays by his own rules, prowling the streets of Manhattan, looking for someone to sleep with.

Marin tries to understand his behavior; he digs deep within himself (“For my parents,” the book is dedicated, “who caused none of my problems”), but in the end, it seems to be the fault of his ex-wife, Elizabeth. “Maybe all women were either too sane or too crazy,” he hypothesizes. And dumb. Marin is merciless in his critique of the intelligence of the women he has hand-picked to date. Their stupidity simply exhausts him.

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On Blondes

Joanna Pitman

Bloomsbury: 292 pp., $24.95

Explanations fall short of the empirical evidence. Images of blonds go back to ancient Greece and Aphrodite (the “first universal blonde”). The allure has something to do with gold, fire, sun, dawn. Joanna Pitman seems amused, but not that amused.

Having experienced blondness herself, she knows the sheer power it wields, the implications of sexuality, wealth and youth. But ultimately “On Blondes” is a meander through history, picking up blond beauties and telling their stories, like that of Mademoiselle Rosalie Duthe in 1775 Paris, the first socially recognized “dumb Blonde.” “It performs” -- wrote one gossip columnist -- “all the actions of a living creature, eating, drinking, dancing and singing as if it were endowed with a mind.” Then there is “Baroness Thatcher,” with her helmet of blond hair; there is Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe; Nazis and Hollywood. Pitman looks at the fear of blonds and the belief in the 16th century that they were more prone to visits by incubi and the devil (i.e. they have more fun). Only one out of 20 people with blond hair are naturally blond, Pitman writes. Why do men like them? Fragility, some ethereal quality; her theories are entertaining, but her arguments are weak.