A Venerable and Time-Tested Guide

THE YEAR IS 1906. Theodore Roosevelt is in the White House. In New York, the newspapers are reporting on the political aspirations of William Randolph Hearst, unrest in Russia, and the latest dividends from US Steel. Scientific American is running articles about exploring the Sargasso Sea. In Boston, The New England Journal of Medicine is discussing new treatments for typhus and tuberculosis. Upton Sinclair’s new novel The Jungle, recently out from Doubleday, portrays the oppressive working conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking industry—Jack London calls it “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of wage slavery”—and it’s taking the country by storm. In October, the Chicago White Sox play the Cubs in the country’s first intracity World Series, which the Sox go on to win (in a massive upset) four games to two.

That fall, the University of Chicago Press also publishes the first edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. For 15-plus years, from the days of the press’s founding in 1890, the editors had been circulating guidelines and style sheets of best practices for their own editorial and production staff. Over the summer, they decide to see if there might be more general interest in, and demand for, these rules outside of the press, so that members of the broader public can better communicate with each other through print. 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.

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