Ibid

Ibid is the third novel by the American writer Mark Dunn, published in 2004 by MacAdam/Cage. Its form is the joke as much as its subject: the life it describes has to be reassembled from the apparatus that would normally sit at the back of a biography.

A series of fictional letters between Dunn and his editor lays out the difficulty. Dunn had exhaustively researched and documented the life of Jonathan Blashette, a man born with three legs who performed in a circus and went on to run a deodorant company and give away a philanthropic fortune, but the only copy of the finished manuscript was knocked into a bathtub and destroyed. The endnotes had not yet been sent to the publisher, and survived.

The editor's solution is to publish the notes without the book they belong to, and the reader is left to work out the shape of Blashette's life from the asides and tangents that were once merely support. The framing device leans on the same joke as Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and, more directly, on the footnote novel Nabokov built in Pale Fire. MacAdam/Cage issued the hardcover in March 2004, with Methuen publishing a paperback edition the following year.