Dear Modern Library Classics,

I've never read [redacted]. In fact, there's a lot of Dickens that I never bothered to read. While browsing for a copy of Oliver Twist, I instead picked up your edition of [redacted]. I liked the cover. I liked the heft. I liked it for all the wrong reasons, really. Still, I bought it and I started it yesterday and it's fantastic and why did you guys think it would be okay to spoil the whole book in the second footnote?

Sorry. I meant to build up to indignation.

But yeah. I'm reading along, loving the book, and thought, "Hm. There doesn't appear to be any end notes." I'm not a Dickens scholar. I like a good endnote. I checked the back and saw that there were endnotes, just no notation of them in the text. "I guess I just wait until I feel confused," I thought, "and then I flip to the back and hope >crosses fingers< that my question will be answered."

I skimmed over the notes that I missed, and that's how I found out the [redacted] of [redacted] dies. In a footnote. The second footnote.

Why you gotta be that way, Modern Library Classics?

I was already a little annoyed that Jonathan Lethem was writing the introduction. It's not your fault he sucks; but you did choose him, and y'all'd done such a great job when you picked Mona Simpson to write the introduction to Anna Karenina (seriously: it's my favorite introductory essay ever, because Simpson seems to have actually read the book, and actually loved the book, and it's like a beautiful love letter from one reader to another). And then, I was a little annoyed that there weren't any notations for end notes. And then (and now I sound insufferable, don't I?), I'm told that [redacted] dies.

You could argue, of course, that Dickens tells us that [redacted] dies when he writes, "in which my little friend and I parted company," in the introduction. But if you're a first-time reader of [redacted], like I am, then it may not necessarily be clear who the "little friend" could mean. It could mean [redacted], sure, but the book's eleventy million pages long and who knows who Dickens may have befriended while writing?

I already treat all the Introductions of classic novels as Afterwards, since invariably they'll write something like-- (I was going to give an example of a spoiled novel, like reveal the plot of The Woman in White or East Lynne, but I've decided to be the better person in this correspondence just in case maybe you haven't read The Woman in White or East Lynne)-- they'll write something that spoils the whole book by revealing the ending or a key plot twist because people who write Introductions, apparently, are sort of bastards who want to show how well-read they are.

But that's not my point. My point is, I should not know in the second footnote that someone -- like, someone in the title of the novel -- dies. I don't know if you can make that a policy or something. But it sure would make reading a more comfortable experience.

Regards,

Michael Bevel
Book Lover
British Adventuress