Okay, I'm taking it down to one star for this one. There were SO MANY things that I noticed that ought--based on the previous volumes--to have had annotations, but did not. Some of these were even quoted poems and lyrics in italics, so there was no excuse for missing them. There were also a couple annotations that mentioned people or places who aren't readily known, like a British garden designer, but weren't explained. We also had some bizarre choices of which annotations to expand upon, like a note that spilled onto a second page because of an extensive quote about a frog found in a fossilized log that could have been summarized in a sentence or two. At least all the annotations were in the right place, unlike in those first two volumes.

That said, for nerds like me this volume did include some handy references: a list of every character in the series, a timeline of the entire series (alas that it does not include some of the later issues), and a list of existing books of collections with a brief summary of what's in them, which would have helped me realize that I'd actually been looking for the Absolute Sandman when I got the first Annotated Sandman from the library. Ah well, guess I'll check those out before the next season of The Sandman drops on Netflix.

Notes not related to annotations that I thought were missing:

> I really ought to read some Ben Johnson and John Webster, Shakespeare's contemporaries/followers. Webster's The White Devil and the Duchess of Malfi are described as "grotesque, near-Gothic stories," which are my kind of thing.

> Fascinating note about seventh sons/daughters of seventh sons/daughters being believed to have special healing powers.

> Quote from the ladies that Rose meets at the nursing home:
"A woman shouldn't have to sleep her life away. Women aren't about dreaming. We're about the real world."
"Even your grandma woke before she died. Women are about waking, Rose."
"As mothers we wake them from nothingness to existence."
"As maidens we wake them to the joys and miseries of adulthood, wake them to the worlds of lust and responsibility."
"And when their time's up, it's always us has to wash them for the last time, and we lay them out for the wake."
(Interestingly, that last part turns out not to be totally true for Dream. Elbis O'Shaugnassy lays Dream for his wake, and though Death, Delirium, and perhaps Desire are women, Destiny and perhaps Desire are men (though Desire may also be both or neither).)

> Another quote from an aspect of the Ladies:
Lyta: "I am seeking the Furies."
Crone: "Not the Furies, my Lobelia [the name isn't glossed]. That's such a nasty name. It's one of the things they call women, to put us in our place."

> And then there's this weird leap of logic that seems a bit much: One of the representatives from the necropolis of Litharge is named Moulder. Pretty obvious to someone familiar with the word why. But then Klinger adds speculation that it's also a tribute to Fox Mulder from the X-Files. Um...almost certainly not. The explanation is so obvious that I'm not going to believe that second speculation unless you have some kind of authorial proof.

> Klinger quotes a poem by Victorian poet Arthur O'Shaughnessy called "Ode" (which is terrible metadata), from his collection Music and Moonlight, which sounds like something I should look up. ( )

It would be 5 stars for Sandman itself, which I read in the original monthly series, but the annotations, while occasionally helpful, are disappointing overall. They are hit and miss. Too many pages go without any sort of notes, and most pages of Sandman include something worth pointing out or discussing in some way. I do not think it incredibly helpful to know which pages were followed by ads. While music references receive adequate attention, references about comics history can be off--if they are explained at all. ( )