The floatrow package, which is useful for customizing the layout of floats, also allows to add footnotes as well as additional explanations (besides the caption) to tables. (The main commands are \mpfootnotemark, \footnotetext and \floatfoot, see p. 25--26 of the manual.) One may also configure the formatting of the actual table content (to, say, \sffamily\small) and the explanations (to say, \sffamily\scriptsize). However, I have not found a way to change the formatting of footnote marks and footnote texts with floatrow. Any ideas?
(Notes: The \ttabbox command in my example, while not strictly necessary, will adapt the width of footnotes/explanations to the width of the actual table material and will also place the caption above instead of below the table. The caption package, which cooperates with floatrow, is used to change the formatting of captions.)
\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage[font={sf,small}]{floatrow}
\floatsetup[table]{footnoterule=none,footskip=0.5\skip\footins}
\usepackage[font=sf]{caption}
\captionsetup{footfont=scriptsize}% "footfont" defined by floatrow package
\begin{document}
\begin{table}
\ttabbox{%
% \centering% Default for floatrow package
\begin{tabular}{cc} \hline
Author & Title \\ \hline
Knuth & The \TeX book\mpfootnotemark[1] \\
Lamport & \LaTeX \\ \hline
\end{tabular}%
\footnotetext[1]{\TeX\ only}%
\floatfoot{All books listed are indispensable reading.}%
}{%
\caption{\TeX/\LaTeX\ books}%
}
\end{table}
\end{document}

