[Maryann Corbett]

Lately I've been paying more attention to the endnote pages in other people's collections. Obviously I'm doing this for selfish reasons: I'm trying to figure out whether to add notes to the collection I've been sending out (and sending, and sending.....)

Certainly notes make sense if it's unlikely that the general reader would know something. For example, I appreciate being told that certain words in the poem are from a plaque on a certain statue in a certain place, like the notes in Patrick Hicks's This London. I'm helped by biographical information like the material in Ned Balbo's The Trials of Edgar Poe.... But I don't need (for example) to have Latin commonplaces translated, or to have explanations of Jewish holidays such as Jehanne Dubrow provides, so I wonder if other readers do. On the other hand, I noticed when I was reading on Thursday that people of student age seemed not to be getting a number of the references, and I don't want to leave them in the dark.

So: whether or not to translate common phrases? explain landmarks in Saint Paul? tell where literary allusions are pointing? and so on.

My question for you all is this: In notes, is there such a thing as too much, particularly from the publisher's point of view?