When I say bookshelf, I include electronic books. Almost every book that is useful and well established has an online edition or an app. That includes dictionaries and the better-known style guides.
House Style Sheet
Strictly speaking, this isn’t on your bookshelf, but it’s going to be somewhere in your system, and the house will have provided it with the first mscript you’ve handled for them. If they didn’t, ask for it and then review it carefully before you start the project. The house style sheet is going to override any other guide you have on hand, including any dictionary the house tells you to use, and you need to have a good sense of what the overrides are. Number treatments, punctuation, use of hyphens, preferred spellings – all of those will be at least a little unique to the house. Yes, you can depart from it if something in the mscript justifies it, but tell the ME early on and explain why. It’s like she will give you a nod. When I receive a house style guide – they tend not to be that long – I go through it line by line, highlighting what I know I will need and winnowing out what I’m sure I won’t. Then I copy the results to the top of my own style sheet.
Houses tend to forget to update their style sheet, so if you have any concerns about it, ask early. In my early days, a textbook house assigned me a third-year criminology textbook, and I found that the style sheet called for APA documentation. The previous edition had applied MLA, so I spent days and days making a highly complicated conversion, only for the ME to ask me, when I’d returned the files, “Why did you do that?” The line in the style sheet about APA had been a leftover from years earlier, but no one in-house had bothered to delete it, because didn’t everybody know? So ask specifically about doc style before you start messing with it.
Dictionaries
Some houses, the big ones, will have a house-produced dictionary (Collins, Nelson). A house that has one will expect you to use it. If it doesn’t, it will tell you which one to use, and that will almost always be Merriam-Webster or Oxford. Both have an app, thank heaven. No more wrestling with a five-pound hardcover, or being jolted when it falls off my desk. In the app versions (I haven’t touched the hardcopies in years), the differences between the two extend beyond the fact that one offers American spelling, and the other English spelling. Oxford is much more specific about preferred spellings; Webster says little about that, so it isn’t as helpful in that regard. Oxford tells you which spelling is a US variant, but Webster doesn’t tell you which is a British variant, which means that even when I’m working for an American house, I still use Oxford to check American spellings. Oxford also tells you where words originated, which, besides being helpful at times, as always fascinating. You can learn a lot about English by learning where words came from.
I emailed an ME once to tell him that I’d found a word an author had used that wasn’t anywhere on the internet. “Slantendiculated.” We both collected words like that, that is, words that don’t exist in the techno-ether, and I was chuffed that I’d found one to show him. Five minutes later he emailed me back with the definition of it that he’d pulled from a nineteenth-century dictionary. Then I remembered that his particular house had what amounted to a library of old dictionaries that the house had used at some point or another. Which reminded me that you can’t know everything about the English language any more than you can know all the stars in the sky. Language is an ever-expanding universe, and an amazing ride if you let it take you.
Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style
This one is endearingly short and simple. It’s the Dick and Jane of style guides. So yes, read it, do, but don’t think while you do that it’s anything like comprehensive or that some of it isn’t dated. It’s useful mainly as a beginner’s introduction to the kinds of things a writer is supposed to care about and take to heart and that a copyeditor would benefit from knowing. It resets your attitude toward language. So if you truly don’t know anything yet about copyediting, read that one first.
Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage
This one has been famous for many decades and verges on encyclopedic. It’s also beautifully written and well structured and has recently been updated to reflect modern English. But … a confession: I don’t own it, and have almost never opened it, because the approach it takes gets in the way of the job. It’s simply too entertaining, to the point of being a distraction. When I’m not working, I’d prefer to escape from my job rather than read about it. When I am working, the house dictionary provides the same information and gets more quickly to the point. Fowler’s would suck me down a rabbit hole. I know this. Now that I’m retired I might actually load it into my tablet to read for fun.
The Chicago Manual of Style
This is the one that a CE basically has to have and the most useful one you can find. That doesn’t mean you have to memorize it or read the whole thing. But it’s arranged so that what a copy editor does need to know is always easy to find. Section III, Chapter 14, on documentation, is especially valuable, and you really ought to review it on a regular basis to make sure you don’t slip into bad habits through sloth or plain forgetfulness. (Remember, though, that that chapter provides what amounts to a baseline, that authors are given leeway up to a point to apply their own preferences, and that variances are always acceptable (Which brings to mind another CE rule: “Don’t reinvent.” Thank you, Frances, for that pearl of advice. More later.) Documentation style is allowed to wobble a little from the baseline, as long as it’s decently close, but you can’t judge whether a variance falls within acceptable unless you know what the baseline is.
CMS is useful for plenty of other things besides. When a mscript is heavy with a foreign language, you had best consult CMS about that language’s treatment and style points before you start. If you wonder whether to cap the d in Tang dynasty, it will tell you (you don’t). If you wonder how to handle ellipses in French quotations, it will tell you. In fact, there is very little it won’t tell you. CMS provides every editor with more than has to be known, so get comfortable enough with it to navigate it quickly, and keep your Post-Its handy, because you will be bookmarking the hell out of it.
There are countless other guides. Stay away from them. You will want a copy of the APA Style Guide for authors who apply that style to documentation (a hot place in hell for APA – if ever a doc style was invented by committee, it’s that one). And you will very rarely run into a house that calls for AP style, or New York Times style, but if you find that a house lists one of those on its style sheet, it is worth checking whether they really mean it. They often don’t – its presence on the style sheet is an artefact (Oxford spelling).
CMS is definitive within the industry, and Fowler is universally trusted and admired, so there’s no point collecting any more guides than those. Other style guides contradict each other so often that they would only add to the noise on your desk. Best if you stick to the three: Strunk and White, Fowler, CMS. And pls note that I’m not writing a style guide here and would never think to try.
The Internet
It’s pretty well useless as a style guide. Check any particular style point online and you’ll find a dozen definitive rules, many of which contradict each other, though all of them are emphatic about their accuracy. (Don’t even trust me – I’m writing this from too deep in the weeds.) The internet is useful as a quick-check spelling dictionary (is it harass or harrass?), but beyond that, keep your trust in it to a minimum.