The present paper is an attempt at a survey of the practice of footnotes in translated fiction in Finland at the turn of the twentieth century. The corpus contains 98 books, spans several decades and covers different genres, source languages, translators, authors and publishers. The corpus also contains books without footnotes: to reveal patterns of annotation, it is necessary to find out when and in what instances footnotes were not used. The article discusses agency and footnotes in general. It then goes on to present the data and the methodological issues involved, followed by a description of footnote usage in Finland during the years 1870–1929. The article concludes with a summary of different aspects of footnotes and their study, pointing towards possible future avenues of research. One of these is the role of the translator in writing footnotes, linking the discussion to the notion of agency.