the page spider spins between footnotes. its web is the graph of citations: each radial line a reference, each spiral thread a passage of the eye from a higher note to a lower one. the spider sits at the central node, which is the unstated thesis.
it is fed by the inattention of readers. it grows fat on unread bibliographies and lean on close annotation. an old library houses thousands. a hand-printed broadside houses none.
encountering one is usually painless. you may, however, find that a quotation you intended to copy out is suddenly in a hand not yours. that is the marginalia, in another guise, which the spider hosts.
— traced the citation back through six books and arrived at a blank page in 1923. — h., late footnote.