This publication history is based on a peculiar historic event: the systematic recopying or transcription of Montaigne's extensive marginal notes by secretaries, librarians, and paleographers in the last years of the 19th century at the Bordeaux City Library. Those transcriptions proved to be a necessary condition (and quid pro quo) for the publication (from 1906-1933) of the first critical editions of Montaigne's complete Essays. It is also, indirectly, a case study of how a literary bureaucracy treats subaltern personnel like sub-librarians and paleographers and how it construes their intellectual property rights.