@timhannigan.bsky.socialti.to/film-noir-uk...

The Manxman (1929) on Location + Live Music

South West Silents, in collaboration with Studiocanal, are proud to present a very special screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Manxman (1929). With live musical accompaniment by Stephen Horne, we are ...

Ooh, thanks! I won't be around, but that looks like a great event...

But have since changed my mind completely. Last couple of books are thoroughly endnoted, and I *really* wish Book #2 in particular also had them...

I think I also had a slight prejudice about a certain impression of trying-too-hard amateurism in some heavily footnoted books that manifestly weren't works of proper scholarship - like, *I'm* not trying to pass myself off as a professional historian here!

I've some sympathy with the "putting readers off" thing. My first couple of books (pop history, though using archival sources) I very deliberately eschewed foot/endnotes as I wanted to emulate the experience of reading a novel.

Just remembered, too, that for Book #3 (also narrative history) the chapter notes *did* have to get dumped online because the publisher was committed to a fixed pagination and there was no space left to spare. So that sort of thing can happen - but not, I think, in this case.

Had a vaguely related experience: 2nd book (narrative history) came out without chapter-by-chapter source notes or index because the publisher went to print 3 months earlier than planned to confect a clash with a senior author publishing at the same time! Fortunately they were added for the reprint.

*My* guess is that maybe he didn't keep proper running source notes as he was working, and didn't have time to get them coherently reconstructed before the book entered production, so added the web address as a stop-gap and cobbled something together there in time for publication.

Same. Plus, in my case, loads of AI clips of absurdly outsized animals.

Thanks Cathryn! Keep an eye out in 2026...