FUN WITH THE CHICAGO MANUAL.

(Warning: This entry will be of interest only to that tiny minority of readers who both use the Chicago Manual of Style and enjoy pointless bibliographical research. But having done the research, I’m damned if I’m going to refrain from sharing it.)

So I was trying to find an example of a paragraph-styled bibliography in the Chicago Manual when I had one of those irrelevant thoughts that so often interrupt my work: “I wonder if, using the magic of the internet, I could find out what books these sample pages are from?” By “sample pages” I mean the section of examples of various styles that follow Chapter 16 (“Bibliographies”) and occupy pages 625-40. In such a soul as mine the thought was herald to the deed; to things that pleaded for delay I gave but little heed. I started googling, and lo!

625: The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, by Adrian Johns (University of Chicago Press, 1998)
626: Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology, by John H. Zammito (University of Chicago Press, 2002)
627: Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism, by Richard Thomas Eldridge (University of Chicago Press, 1997)
628: Comic Faith: The Great Tradition from Austen to Joyce, by Robert M. Polhemus (University of Chicago Press, 1980) [But the page in the Google Books edition is headed SELECT (not SELECTED) BIBLIOGRAPHY, and differently laid out.]
629: Tadpoles: The Biology of Anuran Larvae, by Roy W. McDiarmid and Ronald Altig (University of Chicago Press, 1999)
630: Social Security and Retirement Around the World, ed. Jonathan Gruber and David A. Wise (University of Chicago Press, 1999) [Again, the page is differently laid out.]
631: Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, by James A. Brundage (University of Chicago Press, 1987)
632: Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics, by K. M. Baker (University of Chicago Press, 1975) [I have not pinned this down definitively, but all circumstantial evidence points to it: the author (who helpfully cites his own work in the first footnote) is K. M. Baker, the works and letters of Condorcet are “frequently cited,” and it’s a UChic book.]
633: The Federal Civil Service System and the Problem of Bureaucracy: The Economics and Politics of Institutional change, by Ronald N. Johnson and Gary D. Libecap (University of Chicago Press, 1994)
634: Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville, tr. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (University of Chicago Press, 2000) [It’s definitely a translation of Tocqueville, and since this one isn’t on Google Books and I doubt UChic would have two competing versions, I think it must be this.]
635: Thomas Watson’s Latin Amyntas (1585) edited by Walter F. Staton, J. [With:] Abraham Fraunce’s translation The Lamentations of Amyntas (1587), edited by Franklin M. Dicky (University of Chicago Press, 1967)
636: Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition, by Catherine R. Stimpson, Lawrence Lipking (University of Chicago Press, 1988)
637: The Scientific Revolution, by Steven Shapin (University of Chicago Press, 1998)
638: An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, by Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J. D. Wacquant (University of Chicago Press, 1992)
639: The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-factor, by Bruce R. Smith (University of Chicago Press, 1999)
640: Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation, by Paul F. Berliner (University of Chicago Press, 1994)

I’m quite pleased by this useless accomplishment, but my pleasure is marred by my failure to identify the example on page 634 (Fig. 16:10). The text is not googleable and there’s just too little information; it’s a translated work about Massachusetts political structures (counties and townships are the particular focus of the page), and it has the striking sentence “The county therefore has, to tell the truth, no political existence,” but that’s not enough to even form hypotheses. If anyone happens to know the book, you can complete this listing and make a goldbricking editor happy. [Thanks to Ben Zimmer in the comments, the book has been identified!]

Comments

  1. Translation of de Tocqueville’s De la démocratie en Amerique, most likely. This translation renders the passage as “There is no assembly which directly or indirectly represents the county; it has, therefore, properly speaking, no political existence.”

  2. Amazing: my heart’s desire fulfilled in fourteen minutes. Thanks, Ben, I’ll add it!

  3. And presumably it’s the 2000 Mansfield and Winthrop edition, given that it’s from U of C Press like the rest of the samples.

  4. (Whoops, you got it already.)

  5. The Smith book (“Acoustic World”…) sounds intriguing; Ackroyd makes some use of it in his biography of London, so I had thought about reading it.

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