Over the 50 years of editorial practice, the HBBW team has amassed an impressive total of almost 80,000 footnotes. These annotations encompass both text-critical remarks (addressing authorial mistakes, strikethroughs, marginalia, etc.) and what we term ‘factual footnotes’ (DE <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rend="italic">sachkritische Anmerkungen</hi>). The latter provide crucial contextual information, such as biographical details of individuals mentioned for the first time, explanations of specific terms, or descriptions of historical events. <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rend="italic">Factual footnotes</hi> make up 82% of the total footnotes and form the focus of this paper.