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.
And it became a hit. In 1906, even though we were already almost 500 years deep into the age of Gutenberg, the English speaking-world had seen nothing else like it. No AP Stylebook (first edition 1953). No MLA Handbook (1977). No comprehensive guides to grammar and syntax, to the uniform practice of formatting text; no complete instructions for attributions and the proper citation of sources; no thought-out rules for compiling bibliographies. Even popular guides to good writing were only just appearing. Henry Watson Fowler and Francis George Fowler’s The King’s English published on the other side of the Atlantic in 1906 as well. In a few more years, as young soldiers came back from World War I traumatized, Cornell University English professor William Strunk Jr. privately printed the first edition (1918) of what would become (with E. B. White’s help) his best-selling Elements of Style, mainly to keep the students in his classroom more focused. H. W. Fowler continued on a further reference work, his classic Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), after his brother and collaborator died during the war. We needed to make sense of the world—how to write, how to read, how to print and publish. As Chicago’s press director wrote to his printer, some 10 years into the life of the Manual, “this title has been an evolution, at first a convenience to the office and later developing into a publicity asset of considerable importance. It has finally come to have a steady sale through our trade channels, and […] in many quarters it is looked upon as an authority in matters of style.”
The 18th edition, published this September, is a touch more robust than the version that appeared after the 1906 World Series. At 1,192 pages, some five times the size of the original edition, it now weighs four pounds. Part I (“Publishing and Editing”) describes how books and journals are conceived and manufactured; how manuscripts are prepared and edited and proofread; how illustrations and tables are meant to look; and—in an expanded section—how copyright law, rights licenses, and permissions are supposed to be administered. Part II (“Style and Usage”) addresses the style and usage issues that the press’s editors started tackling 120 years ago: grammar, punctuation, spelling, numbers, abbreviations, and more, including how to use languages other than English in print and how quotations and dialogue should be presented. Part III (“Source Citations and Indexes”) tackles citations (tons of citations), bibliographies, and indexes—print’s foundational apparatuses for verification, the core of scholarly publishing, and in many ways the key to releasing factual information into a world rife with epistemic mayhem. Revisions of this “venerable and time-tested guide to style, usage, and grammar” have appeared over the past century at regular if somewhat uneven intervals, the latest editions having been published in 1969, 1982, 1993, 2003, 2010, and 2017. The standard gestation period for each new edition is something like seven to 10 years. Close to two million copies of the book have sold; there’s a lively online edition, a blog, and even associated merchandise (I’ve seen laptop stickers, aprons, even a beach towel!).
The newest edition is billed as “the most extensive revision in a generation,” one that “balances tried-and-true editorial logic with an attention to real-world usage based on evidence that is easier than ever to find and evaluate.” This means (one shouldn’t give away the whole plot) that there are critically important new passages born of a deepening social responsibility in line with the times: how best to render text accessible to consumers with disabilities, a brand new section on inclusive language, guidance on Indigenous languages and sources (and rules advising that we capitalize Black, White, and Indigenous), and an endorsement of the singular “they” as a pronoun for an individual—“as needed,” the editors write, “to refer not only to someone who is nonbinary but also to anyone whose gender is unknown or irrelevant (or concealed for reasons of privacy).”
Such good care! Writing—with the right word choice, structure, syntax, punctuation—remains a conveyance like no other. Soviet short story maestro Isaac Babel has one of his characters, a writer and translator, say: “When a phrase is born, it is both good and bad at the same time. The secret of its success rests in a crux that is barely discernible. One’s fingertips must grasp the key, gently warming it. And then the key must be turned once, not twice.” And, perhaps more quotably: “No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.”
And for those who have noticed, as Nathan J. Robinson put it, that the truth is so often paywalled while the lies are free, the 18th edition’s fuller section on copyright is thrilling, containing as it does discussions of, and recipes for using, open access, Creative Commons, and the Internet Archive’s peerless Wayback Machine. “To enter the public domain is of course the ultimate fate of all copyrighted works,” the editors tell us. But concatenating changes to long-standing laws by the most powerful rights holders “have made entering the public domain almost theoretical for works currently being created.”
The new edition also begins to advise us how best to credit text, electronic works, and other published material generated with artificial intelligence. It provides us with updated guidance about how to cite still and moving images, sound, online media, and social media—the provenance now of so many white-hot lies and nonsense. Citations from one popular social media platform, for example, “should include enough text from the original post to identify it (up to 280 characters, including spaces, and retaining any emojis). Add a URL to the end of the citation.” To quote an 18th-edition best-practice example of a 2022 citation from Twitter:
NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb), “👀 Sneak a peek at the deepest & sharpest infrared image of the early universe ever taken—all in a day’s work for the Webb telescope. (Literally, capturing it took less than a day!),” Twitter (now X), July 11, 2022, https://twitter.com/NASAWebb/status/1546621080298835970.
Text is one of the main ways we can convey facts and truths at a time when so many people—and often the most powerful figures on the planet—are almost always lying. Nothing could be more important, therefore, than this manual’s guidelines for citations—for sourcing evidence for written communication. With them, we anchor ourselves in reality, making our words part of that reality and insisting that we respect their very real consequences. As Princeton historian Anthony Grafton reminds us in his 1997 book The Footnote: A Curious History:
Only the use of footnotes and the research techniques associated with them makes it possible to resist the efforts of modern governments, tyrannical and democratic alike, to conceal the compromises they have made, the deaths they have caused, the tortures they or their allies have inflicted.
Citation is hard. What the Chicago Manual and all the key rule books of professional citation—the American Medical Association (AMA) Manual of Style, the legal profession’s Bluebook—put forward is based on the challenges to truth that authors, editors, printers, publishers, and librarians have faced over five millennia of writing and six centuries of the printed word. 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.
That said, we could use more thinking about citing truths from other, richer media (what the Manual calls “multimedia”), and eventually verifiable facts within those media. When the Chicago Manual first appeared in 1906, the telephone (in everyone’s hand now) was only just coming into widespread use. There was no radio yet, but the first mobile wireless radio signal started transmitting in Massachusetts that Christmas Eve. Thomas Edison was experimenting with producing short films for his Vitascope. The Miles brothers were recording San Francisco’s devastation in the April earthquake and fire—for two hours on 7,000 feet of nitrate film (only nine minutes of which survive). The first feature-length movie, The Story of the Kelly Gang, was released that year. There was no television, but one of its American inventors, Philo Farnsworth, was born that summer. There was no internet. YouTube was 99 years away. In short, 1906 was still a print-run world.
Yet the 20th century as a whole, in which 14 of the Chicago Manual’s editions appeared, was nothing, as we now know, if not also the century of film. Historians sometimes point to the birth date of cinema as December 28, 1895, when Auguste and Louis Lumière hosted paying customers at their first public screening. Wars and peacemaking, air travel, space travel, royal weddings, presidential assassinations—the camera soon recorded everything. Today, some five millennia into the chirographic order and six centuries into the regime of typography, the record of modern times is becoming—if not wholly, then at least largely—video-based, and digital video and audio are emerging everywhere in what used to be print-only publications. News is just one part of what we read, but still, we hear from the top researchers at the Pew Research Center that only one in four US adults today says they often or sometimes get their news in print, the lowest number the surveys have ever recorded.
As video comes to dominate our screen-based universe, and the second century of film starts to look back on the first, a new uniform set of citation methods and standards will be required for quoting, referencing, and linking our moving-image and recorded-sound stories of the past to the present and the future—citations that point, via persistent record locators, to moving-image resources, but also citations within moving images that function like footnotes (especially in video that is archived online). For publishers, authors, librarians, reviewers, customers, and scholars to gain greater confidence in the use of moving image and sound content in their research, teaching, and publishing, and for us to regard moving images with the same authority with which we regard print today, we require the standardization of these same kinds of citations in and around moving images and sound. We require assurances that library collections will hold material and sustain collections with the same dependability as they do print archives—that moving image and sound evidence is verifiable and, like the vanishing audiovisual records of the January 6 committee hearings (stripped by Republicans from the House of Representatives’ website and available only in places like the independent Internet Archive), will not somehow disappear altogether.
Experts now consider disinformation and misinformation to be the world’s top risks, ahead of climate change and extreme weather, economic crises, armed conflict, everything. How we communicate with one another and prove our points is more important than ever. The Chicago Manual of Style has been a beacon on a hill for more than a century. What do we do if—or as—people start to get all their information from TikTok? Is TikTok news? Is it information? Do we argue on it now, Tik for Tok? 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?
The world of media that is sourced before being distributed may be crumbling in front of us like the Great Sphinx of Giza. It’s an international problem. As the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2024 tells us:
Emerging as the most severe global risk anticipated over the next two years, foreign and domestic actors alike will leverage Misinformation and disinformation to further widen societal and political divides. […] As close to three billion people are expected to head to the electoral polls across several economies—including Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, the United Kingdom and the United States—over the next two years, the widespread use of misinformation and disinformation, and tools to disseminate it, may undermine the legitimacy of newly elected governments. Resulting unrest could range from violent protests and hate crimes to civil confrontation and terrorism.
Beyond elections, perceptions of reality are likely to also become more polarized, infiltrating the public discourse on issues ranging from public health to social justice. However, as truth is undermined, the risk of domestic propaganda and censorship will also rise in turn. In response to mis- and disinformation, governments could be increasingly empowered to control information based on what they determine to be “true”. Freedoms relating to the internet, press and access to wider sources of information that are already in decline risk descending into broader repression of information flows across a wider set of countries.
Citation is hard. How do you cite a dream? How do you cite dance? A musical performance? A piece of a painting? A map? A place in the sky? A thought? The eureka moment in an experiment? A memory? Or someone else’s fantasy? Applying the same apparatus to the posts and tweets and sounds and videos we all now routinely share will take some doing. We’re still working it out. Meanwhile, venerable, time-tested, and indispensable—we can thank our lucky stars for the work they do in Chicago.
