If you've ever written an academic paper, then you should recognize the term "ibid." Here's a reminder, just in case. When footnotes are used to credit sources and to provide sidebar explanations away from the main text, the word "ibid" is used when the quote comes from the same source as in the previous note. It's shorthand for the Latin term "ibidem," meaning "in the same place." Still, why would a book be called Ibid? And how could any story be told solely in footnotes?

Enter author and playwright Mark Dunn. He likes to find different ways of telling tales. As he told BookPage interviewer Alden Mudge in 2002, "I'm on a mission that every new novel I write is going to bend or tweak narrative as much as I can. I think writers need to be a little more daring. There are a lot of ways to tell stories and construct narratives that writers shy away from because they want to be either traditional or safe. I decided that's not going to be my mission." This deliberate choice explains his writing of such books as Ella Minnow Pea: a Progressively Lippogrammatic Epistolary Fable (2001), in which the characters must cope with the ongoing disappearance of letters from their alphabet, as must the readers of the book (see Rambles.NET review, and We Five (2015), where the perspective of a single story is told by five different characters in five different places and at five different periods of time. Ibid is similarly unique in both style and subject matter.

The premise for this fictional biography begins with a handful of letters. From this correspondence we learn that the author sent his only copy of the original manuscript text (without footnotes) to his editor. Unfortunately, the papers were accidentally destroyed before the editor could read them or copy them. The despondent author admitted that he could not rewrite what had taken him two years to finish. All that he had left were the footnotes. Many of them contained such substantial descriptions and explanations that it could be possible for readers to figure out what the main text had been. The editor somehow agreed to publish the book with just the footnotes alone. And we are left to dive into them on our own, chapter by chapter.

Aside from the tangential storytelling technique: This is the life of Jonathan Blashette (1888-1962), a man who was born with three legs. Because of his abnormality, he spent some time as a circus sideshow act as a child. He left to go back home and to graduate from high school and college. As an adult, he founded the successful Dandy-de-odor-o Company, which created and sold a line of deodorants specifically designed for men. Jonathan was generally a kind man and a decent boss who had some good friends and acquaintances, but he had abysmal luck with the ladies throughout the entire course of his life. Simply awful. Along the way, he also had occasions to correspond, rub elbows with or otherwise run into a number of historical figures and celebrities. And there were a number of near misses as far as name-dropping went, too. One of his best friends and employees was named Harlan Davison, for example. Jonathan lived and worked and traveled. After retirement, he gave a lot of his savings away to anyone who had a dream and a cause -- much to the chagrin of Harlan and others. And in the end he died generally as a satisfied man, even with his fair amount of quirks. In addition to the extra leg.

Dunn must have had a lot of fun with the writing here. He had an odd main character who did odd things that could approached in an odd, side-handed way. He also had to create fictional sources for his quotes and sidebars. And if readers pay enough attention to them, they'll find that the publication details generate some laughs, too. A major source for the biographer was, of course, Jonathan Blashette's own diaries, which were deposited along with his other papers at the Pettiville Library and Interpretive Center in his hometown of Pettiville, Arkansas. (Try finding this town on a map.) Another source, albeit a dubious one, was Cordell Glover's book, Three Legs, One Heart: The Story of Jonathan Blashette (Fairhope, Alabama: Hollon House, 1989), which we are told early on to be "monumentally flawed, indolently under-researched, and offensively over-embroidered." A number of esoteric professional periodicals were consulted, including Calliope: The Magazine of the Circus, the Journal of American Amputation and the Journal of Entrepreneurial History. And naturally the author credits personal interviews with a number of Jonathan's friends, associates and shirt-tail relatives. Yes, every novelist has to be an inventor. But the task does not usually extend to bibliographies. Maybe this fact struck me particularly funny because I've worked in libraries and have dealt with books and citations for most of my life. Dunn tells a good tale and summarily spoofs the genre of biography and the writing of it at the same time. Kudos, Mr. Dunn!

Ibid is recommended light reading to anyone who wants something different, entertaining, humorous and occasionally borderline bawdy. It teems with characters that are simultaneously outrageous and yet are somehow believable, too. You may almost wish that a three-legged man really did make his fortune selling men's deodorants. Stranger things have happened.