Second generation offset presses made first generation offset presses that would fit in a garage inexpensive and putting a stack of pages in a vice, laying down a glue mat along the spine to grip those page and wrapping a paper cover around gave us the perfect-bound book and gave us the small press revolution. Trade publishers, university presses and other presses inside institutional obstacle courses didn't control who would appear in multiple, spreadable copies. Now, we've a cyberhum in the phone lines and wireless tracks, and books are hyperperfect-bound, pages held together and in order by links. In a sense, a book can be "unbound" in an author's mind and be "differently" bound by an arranger. Or, you can download one of these books for your personal library. Give the book its own directory inside your library directory.
      Now, you want to have your good thumbed copy with underlining or highlighting, marginalia, interbook and intrabook links (live cross references) and anything else to keep your live responses with the poem.
      This is such a page. It's from my book Return of the Shaman. I don't do a lot here. I underline a few lines at the end of a short poem and I put a pop-up bit of marginalia by them—as you might underline and write a brief note. In a softer light, I might just change the lines to blue text (from the black) and I might separate lines and have a box to hold my note. Below the page, I'll show you how to do these simple things. I block out the html code very simply and by looking at the pages and consulting an HTML for Dummies book, you can do fine. When you learn a little, you can do as much even in very intimidating pages.... This page is from one of the books on my site and all it's links work. I haven't added any cross-reference links, but they'd work too—assuming I had a working path in the link.

 

Annotation
toc
page thumber: In the Ateliers Table of Contents
THE TRANSFIGURATION

Hardly the time for it,
no hope or
art
walking along some street
alone, and to where
I'll be alone
and hating it
til the roadside, formed of
weeds and litter, mounded dirt, broken rock, skitter
of paper, flicker of bottle lid,
is suddenly, in soft

sunlight
carved from
gems.                marginalia

page thumber: In the Ateliers Table of Contents

 

Typing 21st century style...
      If you want to underline some of the text, assume that the three dots in my example below are that text. You put in tags (<tag>) fore and aft. <u>...</u>. Use i to get italic print and b to get boldface. If you want, say, blue text, use <font color="blue">...</font>.
      Now, how about that fancy margin-note (you might want just a black "Note" or an asterisk)? Well, to see all of what I do, go to your Browser menu and find View and, then, View/Source. The page's html source (what is actually typed for the browser to do its typesetting) will show everything I do to render the poem and to do my marking up of this copy. To see what I started from (in the browser), go to the page thumber and click on a Previous or Next page. From that page, click on The Transfiguration. You will see the book page. Two clcks on [Back] gets you back here.
      Here is the template I use to make that marginalia note on the page. You may select the text on this screen, copy it to the clipboard and paste it into a text editor such as Windows' Notepad. Save it as a file named popnote.htm. Then, Copy and paste it into a personal library copy of a page where you wish your marginalia to be. Down at the end where your clickable text will be, I have only an asterisk. You can type in any label for your note. This page's Source has <sup><b>marginalia</b></sup> to yield the raised (superscript) and red word.
<a href="Javascript:alert(' ' +
' ' +
' ' +
' ' +
' ' +
' ' +
' ' +
' ' +
' ' +
' ' +
' ' +
' ' +
' ' +
' ' +
'')">*</a>
      Your text will appear inside a set of single quotes. In this template, you see that each line has a set and then a plus (+). You will want short lines in your source for your convenience. So the "one long line" for the browser is broken into short lines and the plus tells the browser to paste these together. I've made a fair stack of these lines. You must use the first and last and as many as you need between them. Delete those you do not need. Again, look at the source for this page to see the one I used by the last lines of the poem.
      You can't easily see on the browser screen, but I have a blank space between each pair. Type in front of it. This space must end each of these quotes before a plus mark. It will be the space between the last word of that quote piece and the first word of the next. You will not have a space at the end of the last line. And you don't need one if the next line will be a skipped line or the first line of a new paragraph. If you want your next quote piece to start a new paragraph, put \n. If you want to skip a line first, put \n\n. Do not skip a space after the last \n (unless you use spaces to indent).
      The "\" is an escape. If you want to use a single quote in the text, in a word like don't, put a slash in front of it (\'). You should do this for a double quote, too, but my browser (IE5.5) has trouble with that and I do not use them in my notes. Use them for parentheses marks, angle brackets, anything that is used "in the template" itself. Your browser will offer some debugging when it can't render your note. But the error messages are, at best, cryptic. The rule: Keep it simple.
       If you want your marginalia right on the page, you will have to work in the vertical. You will have to push the lines apart and insert the little table. You could create a second column on the page—but that is not easily done. I did it for a poem, Credo in Return of the Shaman. Part of the poem is side-notes. Believe me, you don't want to do that. It's easier to just let the poem flow over your box when you read....
<center> <table border="1" width="300" cellpadding="5">
<tr>
<td>
Your note goes here. You can use all your html
tags to control font size, color and face, italics,
boldface, underlining and the rest. You can have
links here (though not in the pop-up notes).

End each paragraph except the last with <br>
—a forced line break.

You can fiddle with the width in the table tag.
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</center>
      Here's what you will see.
 
Your note goes here. You can use all your html tags to control font size, color and face, italics, boldface, underlining and the rest. You can have links here (though not in the pop-up notes).

End each paragraph except the last with <br>—a forced line break.

You can fiddle with the width in the table tag.

  I don't know of any hyperperfect-bound books other than mine on the Web, but you can easily Google to and grab source for Pound's Seafarer (mine is in Fires) or Wallace Stevens Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird and have your own annotated copies in your personal library. More often than not, the html code will be older and simple. Even more "sophisticated" code will have accessible insertion points, though, if you look at it carefully and employ a little trial and error.