Some folks are allergic to footnotes, but they can be used beautifully. Maybe my favorite single book is a nineteenth-century edition of The Memoirs of the Count de Grammont in which the footnotes take up considerably more pages than the text, since each name mentioned by the gossipy Count links to a collection of all other gossip available on the character. This web of links gives us a sense of closed community too irresistibly energetic to seem truly claustrophobic -- at least when viewed safely from the outside.