The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Official Style Guide Used by the Writers and Editors of the World's Most Authoritative Newspaper [Paperback]

I write fiction, and this guide works wonderfully anyway; I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to a fiction writer. Sometimes--but only rarely--entries don't apply to fiction writing, or the rules differ.

The manual is organized alphabetically, not just by subject, but the entire book is alphabetical. This makes it *so* much easier to find what I'm looking for than the other reference guides.
E.g.: Do titles of books go in quotes? Look up "book" and the answer is there. If the answer isn't there, this manual anticipates what you may be looking for and tells you: for titles, see "title." If you look up the word, "quote," it will tell you how to use quotation marks (not 2nd grade information, but every permutation of those gnawing things you just aren't quite sure about when writing a professional cover letter or a story). And again, it can anticipate what was left out of the "quote" entry and send you elsewhere.

It's a keyword book, organized alphabetically, beginning to end. It *is* the glossary, in a sense, but the glossary doesn't send you to a wordy, where's-what-I-want chapter; the info is succintly at hand. No need to spend any amount of time searching for your question, or answer; it's there for you, as is the reason for the usage. I'd call this the opposite of the Chicago Manual of Style, where time spent searching for where they may have chosen to put my question is an exercise in frustration.

This is a great reference guide for any writer's desk, and within my reach at all times.

The New York Times book offers clarity and sensibly an alphabetical solution to the contents so that you can look up, for instance, elements of punctuation individually rather than have them all grouped under Punctuation. The manual takes a whole page to explain the use of hyphens and intriguingly uses this example 'Use the suspensive hyphen rather than repeat the second part of a modifier, in cases like this: On successive days there were three-, five- and nine-inch snowfalls' Quite correct but not very elegant I thought. It is this attention to detail and the thoroughness of the manual that impressed me.

I think it is worth mentioning here a rather unique style guide by Keith Waterhouse (author of 'Billy Liar) called 'Waterhouse on newspaper style'. I frequently get this out because it such a joy to read. Originally produced for journalists on the Daily Mirror (in the past the leading British tabloid) it is alphabetical but concerned with style more than anything, part of the contents might give you a feel of the subject matter, Adjectives, Alliteration, And now, The asthmatic comma, Captions, Catchwords, Clichés (standard), Clichés (trade), Compression, Consequences, Crossheads, Dead letters, Dots and dashes. It was published in the UK by Viking in 1989 and is well worth searching out.

Strengths: In-depth explanation of hyphenation with prefixes (pre-, in-, under-), very useful for a technical writer.
Flaws: It's got a strong NY regional focus (to be expected) and omits some useful words such as "hitchhike".

I back it up with the AP stylebook and Fowler's Modern English Usage.