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My book club pick sparked a 40 minute debate over a single footnote
I brought a history book to my group last month, one of those ones with dense source notes. Nobody reads footnotes usually, right? But one little reference about a misdated letter changed how we saw the whole author's argument. We spent 40 minutes just on that one note, tearing apart whether the publisher left it in by accident or on purpose. It got me thinking about how we treat the edges of a book, the parts that seem like filler. In my experience, the boring stuff like indexes and acknowledgements can hide the most interesting fights. Have any of you had a debate that started from something tiny like a footnote or a map in the back?
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moore.beth3d ago
...and honestly that reminds me of the time I found a typo in a cookbook that completely changed my opinion on the author. It wasn't even a footnote, it was a copyright page, of all places. The book claimed it was a first edition but the printing code said it was clearly the fourth or fifth run. I brought it up at dinner once and my sister swore I was making it up to start a fight. Three hours later we were digging through her garage looking for her old copy just to compare dates. We never actually settled it, but I still can't read that cookbook without side-eyeing the whole thing. Sometimes the dumbest little detail can just take over your brain, you know?
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