#usagefail Louis Menand: Why Buy the Chicago Manual of Style?

A very funny passage in a very thoughtful essay on the art (and agony) of citation.

This new “Chicago Manual” is the fifteenth edition of a work that made its publishing début in 1906. (Before that, it served an incarnation as the in-house style sheet at the University of Chicago Press.) It is important to note at the outset that the new edition has nine hundred and fifty-six pages and retails for fifty-five dollars. The only reasons to buy it are (1) that you want to start up a press and (2) that you want it to be exactly like the University of Chicago Press. “The Chicago Manual of Style” is, fundamentally, the in-house authority for bookmaking at the Press.

via The End Matter: The New Yorker.

Related posts:

1. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making by Adrian Johns
2. Should “piazza” be italicized? #usagefail http://tinyurl.com/piazzaital
3. Style Manual
4. The Chicago Manual of Style Online 1.62: Part titles and pagination
5. The Chicago Manual of Style