Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style [Hardcover]

Mark’s feature articles have appeared in a variety of national and regional consumer magazines, including The Oxford American, Writer's Digest, Walking, and Guitar Player. His feature writing for The Oxford American received an honorable mention in The Best American Travel Writing 2000 (Houghton Mifflin). Mark’s first book, Searching for Mary, was published by Dutton in 1998. His second book, Come Together: The Official John Lennon Educational Tour Bus Guide to Music and Video, was published in 2006 by Thomson. He currently works as an Executive Editor at Course Technology, a business and technology book publisher.

Cards on the table: I love The Elements of Style. I love the idea of it; I love its execution. I love the book’s history, and I love its attitude. I love the fact that it makes some people nuts. I love its trim size. I love the trade dress of the 1979 third edition: The authors’ last names fill the top half of the honey-mustard cover in a stocky, crimson, sans serif typeface—as late seventies as Huggy Bear’s hat—with the title itself rendered in thinner, mostly serifed type, black, in the bottom half. And in the bottom right corner, reversed out white inside a black triangle is this come-on: “With Index.” Nice.

Over the years, I have collected multiple copies of The Elements of Style, though without much in the way of method or even, really, intent. I am apparently unable to pass up nicely preserved editions in used-book stores; it’s the same sort of trouble some people face when confronted with a heretofore unseen edition of Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium or a cache of Wodehouse novels—or, for others, an unopened six-pack of Billy beer. The copy of Elements in my house that has seen the most action is a paperback third edition from my college years. Its yellowed pages are edged with my own marginalia, scribbled in the heat of new revelation, no doubt, but so old and so sloppily written that it’s mostly indecipherable now.

My rarest copy is a 1959 first edition, first printing, in great condition, including a perfectly intact dust jacket (thin, elegant black and white serifed type over a background color that a kitchen-appliance manufacturer might call Harvest Gold), that I found on a cold afternoon’s romp through Bookmans Used Books in Flagstaff, Arizona. I paid four dollars for it, an edition that I have seen marked as high as two hundred dollars elsewhere in the used-book trade.

My favorite copy, however, is from the fourteenth printing of the 1979 edition. The book is case-bound, with a vinyl-impregnated buckram cover, forest green. Its signatures are Smyth-sewn; its dust jacket is flawless, in the ochre-red-black design just described, and protected by a Mylar cover. It is a pristine edition in all respects but one: A previous owner, perhaps fighting sleep in a mid-April English class—windows open, dogwoods in the school yard blinding white in the afternoon light, fat bees at work among the blooms—etched his name in red block letters across the top edge of the book’s pages: PERKINS.

Perkins! Are we keeping you up? Sit up straight, man, and contemplate the prize you hold in your hand. Few books of this size (thin as a buttermilk pancake, six ounces waterlogged), in fact, few books of any size, have had the impact on American literary culture and thought that The Elements of Style has. Ounce for ounce, it has done more to establish an American ideal of good prose style than any other book or any teacher, living or dead. Its authors, William Strunk Jr. and E. B. (Elwyn Brooks) White, have joined the pantheon of twentieth-century creative duos whose names, over time, have been transformed into brands, if not movements. Think Rodgers and Hammerstein, the Wright brothers, Tracy and Hepburn, Lennon-McCartney. In fact, The Elements of Style is often called “Strunk and White,” usually run together in the pronunciation, “strunkenwhite,” the authors’ names forever fused, as in “Perkins, please revisit strunkenwhite, Rule 12.” And, as with most great duos, the names themselves are now powerful enough to conjure by. For generations the book, by its title or its authors’ names, has been widely venerated as a sure, succinct guide to the fundamentals of good writing. But there’s more to it than that. No simple book of tips about clear writing sells in the kinds of numbers this book sells. There’s something else going on.

The Elements of Style as we know it today almost didn’t happen. It took a fat slice of chance circumstance, and thirty-eight years, to draw the elements together. William Strunk Jr., a professor of English at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, self-published the first edition of the book in 1918. I have held a copy in the Cornell archives; it’s a slight thing, only forty-three pages, with a lightly textured card-stock cover. Intended as a quick-reference guide for his students, The Elements of Style covered the basics of clear and clean writing—tips on usage, composition, word choice, spelling—and it simplified Strunk’s task of grading papers and saved him the cost, in both time and tedium, of using valuable class time to reiterate the fundamentals. The book’s advice was useful and accurate, it covered only the essentials, and its tone was brisk. Strunk’s Elements of Style sold in the campus bookstore for twenty-five cents, and it enjoyed a respectable run at Cornell, going through several editions in Strunk’s lifetime. One of the Cornellians plunking down his quarter in 1919 was E. B. White, a student in Strunk’s English Usage and Style class. There were plenty of things about college young Elwyn didn’t care for, but the future essayist, children’s author, and voice of The New Yorker magazine liked this class, and he liked William Strunk. After White’s graduation in 1921, he and Strunk remained friends, but White’s memory of The Elements of Style eventually faded.

Time passed. Lots of it. E. B. White began his long career at The New Yorker in 1926. The Depression came and went. Collections of White’s essays, sketches, and poems were published. World War II rolled through. White wrote and published his first book for children, Stuart Little. William Strunk Jr., after a forty-six-year teaching career and nine years of retirement, passed away. White published the children’s classic Charlotte’s Web and still more collected essays. Finally, in the spring of 1957, thirty-eight years after he had last laid eyes on the book, and eleven years after Strunk’s death, White received a copy of the 1918 edition of The Elements of Style in the mail; it had been sent by an old college friend who thought White would find it amusing. What happened next is well known to Elements fans—it’s recounted in the introduction of every edition—and it’s where the story really begins.

When Paul McCartney met John Lennon, at a Quarry Men gig in Liverpool, his first impulse was to pick up a guitar and play. When White re-met The Elements of Style in 1957, he, too, turned to his art: He took to the typewriter to tell his readers about Elements and about William Strunk. In a “Letter from the East” column published that summer in The New Yorker, E. B. White wrote about the “rich deposits of gold” he had rediscovered in the little book and about its author, whom he recalled as friendly, funny, audacious, and self-confident. “Will knew where he stood,” White wrote. “He scorned the vague, the tame, the colorless, the irresolute. He felt it was worse to be irresolute than to be wrong.” Strunk tickled White, and White admired his old professor’s outlook: Say what you mean, and say it clearly.

The “Letter from the East” caught the eye of Jack Case, a New Yorker reader and alert editor working in the college book department of The Macmillan Company. Immediately after reading White’s tribute to Strunk, maybe even before finishing it, Case contacted White to say that his company was interested in publishing The Elements of Style and using White’s essay as the book’s introduction. They struck an agreement, and, over the next year, White performed a thorough overhaul and updating of Strunk’s original text; revised his New Yorker essay to work as the book’s introduction; wrote a foreword, “A Note on This Book”; and added a new final chapter, “An Approach to Style.” The result, a collaborative teacher-student effort that spanned four decades (not to mention the great divide), was Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. First published in 1959, the book vaulted the charts like “Love Me Do” and has hovered in the ether ever since. Before White’s death in 1985, two more editions were published, in 1972 and 1979. The current edition, the fourth, was published in 1999.

We’ve already seen that my tender feelings for The Elements of Style extend even to the physical book itself. I recognize that’s a little peculiar. In my defense, I’m not the first bibliophile guilty of cherishing a book nearly as much for its look and its feel in the hand as for its content. And, as I think about it, this appreciation for a book’s shape and structure over, or aside from, its subject matter is an apt parallel to the main argument of The Elements of Style itself—the idea that a clear conception of form, the mechanics of communicating ideas through writing, stands behind and makes possible the successful expression of intellectual content. The Strunk and White prescription, distilled, is this: Master the fundamentals of good form, and, assuming you have something to say, the results—communication, style, art—will take care of themselves.

Elements enthusiasts are in large supply—the book has sold well over 10 million copies since 1959—and they tend to voice their praise with Strunkian directness. “Most books about writing are filled with bullshit,” says Stephen King in his best-selling On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. “One notable exception is The Elements of Style. There is little or no detectable bullshit in t...