The sixteenth edition of the book we in trade publishing call CMS but the publishers of the book call CMOS has just been released. If you are interested in the minutiae of publishing this tome, check the Subversive Copy Editor's latest blog post: www.subversivecopyeditor.com/my.weblog/cmos16-outtakes.html. Really, laughs for longtime users abound.
Of course now I must purchase it, and I'm sure it'll cost a pretty penny. Business expense, of course, but still . . . sigh. However, if you are putting together a collection of reference works on writing, whether scholarly, for the web, or for print, this is the most important book you can own, standing side by side with Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed.
The University of Chicago Press publishes the book, and it is the style used throughout the publishing world as well as in many colleges and universities. It tells you everything you need to know about books, from what frontmatter is, to how to construct notes, bibliographies, and reference sections. It deals with grammar, usage, punctuation, syntax, and more than I can write down without quoting an entire table of contents. If you want to know how to use commas and semicolons, CMS is the place to look. When do you use a colon and how? What about dashes, long and short? You'll find all the rules and then you'll have to decide which ones you can let an author or, if you are the author, which ones make sense to break and which ones should never be broken (probably on pain of death from one of the editors of CMS).
I will talk fairly soon about reference works in general, but I read the Subversive Copy Editor's blog and just had to pass along the fun.
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