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A Venerable and Time-Tested Guide: The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th Edition

Peter B. Kaufman reviews the 18th edition of “The Chicago Manual of Style.”

The 201-page book (the press still offers up a free facsimile edition online) provides pointers “jotted down at odd moments for the individual guidance of the first proofreader; [then] added to from year to year, as opportunity would offer or new necessities arise; revised and re-revised as the scope of the work, and, it is hoped, the wisdom of the workers, increased.” They call it “the embodiment of traditions, the crystallization of usages, the blended product of the reflections of many minds”—a compendium of “fundamentals.” Chicago’s editors say they do not want their manual’s proposed new rules and regulations to be considered definitive, or to be treated by any readers with, as they put it, the “fixity of rock-ribbed law.” Their little manual “lays no claim,” they write, “to perfection in any of its parts; bearing throughout the inevitable earmarks of compromise, it will not carry conviction at every point to everybody.” First copies go on sale right after the World Series for 50 cents. Looking back, the proto-cuneiform pictographs from Sumer; the styli pressed into clay in ancient Babylon; the chiseled stones and inked papyri from the Nile; the lambskin scrolls, paper sheets, and codices of the early church; up to and through the books, journals, magazines, newspapers, and manuscripts of the present day—this is the world to which these guides have sought to bring some order over the past 12 decades. Or is it, like X, like Instagram, random snippets of media, sets of statistics, and examples from history and other pieces of future evidentiary arguments that may or may not be true, may or may not have been prepared and vetted by reporters and journalists and editors and fact-checkers of the kind that book publishers, newspapers, magazines, and television networks have been building as part of their epistemic architecture for centuries?

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