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Reference materials I don't actually reference...
I find reference material, manuals, and guidebooks to be thrilling. Dictionaries of all sorts (I still fondly remember the ridiculous dictionary of rhymes I had throughout high school, which I sometimes used my freshman year for the torture of my teachers by writing rhyming epic poems instead of essays), handbooks, whatever. Recently, since I've been taking on more and more freelance work of various sorts, I decided to set aside some money every month to acquire more and more reference books.
When I worked at Tor, I had a huge number of reference books, taking up two or three shelves. I thought it only fair to leave them for the company's use when I left, since the company had paid for them. A partial list of what had been on the shelves behind my desk:
(I actually took the Web 10 and Chicago 14 with me when I left, because those were mine, handed down to me from Jenna Felice, and good luck prying them from even my cold, dead hands. They are currently wrapped in bubble wrap in storage, though, until I can clear out more space on the bookshelves here.)
I will be honest: the only materials I ever actually used for anything were the dictionaries and the CMS (usually as backup for when someone was arguing with me about whether or not it was appropriate to use "phase" as a synonym for "faze" and other ridiculous things) -- and Europe: A History
. (I also had an amazing copy of the OED that ran in DOS, which was often useful when editing historical novels for the information it provided about when words came into common use and how their meanings changed over time.)
However, I found the shelves full of reference materials to be infinitely comforting.
I have boxes of reference books in storage right now, most of them from my undergraduate religious studies courses. Compilations of origin stories that professors put together from decades-old mimeographs, anthologies of essays about modern-day nuns, feminist critiques of religious institutions, at least two books about the Sumerian language and culture, and a bunch of different versions/translations of the Christian Bible, the Qur'an, and the Torah, amongst other things. I didn't use most of that stuff when Kat and I were writing Salt and Silver
-- but I liked having access to it, just in case I needed it!
Most recently I've acquired the following:
And... well, I haven't used any of them, because I've been copyediting and proofreading for 10+ years and I can spell embarrass, mischievous, occasionally, supersede... I know most bad breaks on sight, have a firm grasp of punctuation (both the "proper" use of it, and the "common" use for making text flow easily for the reader), Americanize Australian and British manuscripts with ease, and when querying my private clients, I go out of my way to cite reputable websites instead of or in addition to the usually expensive or hard to find reference books, so it's easy to look at the context of what I'm talking about and acquire more information instead of having to take my word for it.
Nevertheless, I have read them -- for fun, because I am a nerd. And whenever I sit down to edit, copyedit, proofread, or polish, I have these reference materials around me. Just in case.
What do you keep around? What's your favorite text to reference when writing or editing?
When I worked at Tor, I had a huge number of reference books, taking up two or three shelves. I thought it only fair to leave them for the company's use when I left, since the company had paid for them. A partial list of what had been on the shelves behind my desk:
- Merriam-Websters Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition
- Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition
- The Chicago Manual of Style, 14th edition
- The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition
- The Encyclopedia of Torture (According to Google, Amazon, Powell's, and AbeBooks.com, this doesn't exist! But I had a copy, so maybe I am misremembering the title.)
- The Star Trek Encyclopedia
The Klingon Dictionary - Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets
- The Encyclopedia Of Witchcraft & Demonology
- Devils & Demons: A Dictionary of Demonology, A Total Guide to the Satanic Realm
- The Complete Idiot's Guide to Voodoo
- Europe: A History
- The Encyclopedia of Hell
- A Dictionary of American Idioms
- Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus
(I actually took the Web 10 and Chicago 14 with me when I left, because those were mine, handed down to me from Jenna Felice, and good luck prying them from even my cold, dead hands. They are currently wrapped in bubble wrap in storage, though, until I can clear out more space on the bookshelves here.)
I will be honest: the only materials I ever actually used for anything were the dictionaries and the CMS (usually as backup for when someone was arguing with me about whether or not it was appropriate to use "phase" as a synonym for "faze" and other ridiculous things) -- and Europe: A History
. (I also had an amazing copy of the OED that ran in DOS, which was often useful when editing historical novels for the information it provided about when words came into common use and how their meanings changed over time.) However, I found the shelves full of reference materials to be infinitely comforting.
I have boxes of reference books in storage right now, most of them from my undergraduate religious studies courses. Compilations of origin stories that professors put together from decades-old mimeographs, anthologies of essays about modern-day nuns, feminist critiques of religious institutions, at least two books about the Sumerian language and culture, and a bunch of different versions/translations of the Christian Bible, the Qur'an, and the Torah, amongst other things. I didn't use most of that stuff when Kat and I were writing Salt and Silver
-- but I liked having access to it, just in case I needed it!Most recently I've acquired the following:
- Copyediting & Proofreading For Dummies
- The Associated Press Stylebook 2009
- Butcher's Copy-editing: The Cambridge Handbook for Editors, Copy-editors and Proofreaders
- Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition
- The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition
And... well, I haven't used any of them, because I've been copyediting and proofreading for 10+ years and I can spell embarrass, mischievous, occasionally, supersede... I know most bad breaks on sight, have a firm grasp of punctuation (both the "proper" use of it, and the "common" use for making text flow easily for the reader), Americanize Australian and British manuscripts with ease, and when querying my private clients, I go out of my way to cite reputable websites instead of or in addition to the usually expensive or hard to find reference books, so it's easy to look at the context of what I'm talking about and acquire more information instead of having to take my word for it.
Nevertheless, I have read them -- for fun, because I am a nerd. And whenever I sit down to edit, copyedit, proofread, or polish, I have these reference materials around me. Just in case.
What do you keep around? What's your favorite text to reference when writing or editing?