The History of Footnote Systems and Style Guides
Style guides have their origin in trade manuals prepared in the printing trades. Guides for proof-readers and copy-editors were first prepared by the publishing arms of evangelical churches and the civil service in the late nineteenth century, derived from the manuals of the printing trades that had existed since the seventeenth century. Proof-readers' guides made public the mysteries of the printing trades – especially for those writers outside the professional world of the metropolitan book-trade, such as missionaries and civil servants. From the early twentieth century, university presses in America published style guides: the University of Chicago Press Manual of Style, first published in 1906, represented itself as a 'codification of the typographical rules' employed by the press in its official printing and publications – although the levels of guidance for footnotes and citations were sketchy and inconsistent [1]. Since then, the Chicago Manual of Style has grown from 109 pages in the third edition to over 881 pages in the most recent fifteenth edition, with over 150 pages of advice about writing footnotes.
In the late twentieth century, the number and variety of style guides has proliferated. Where once style guides were the domain of publishers, now they are often issued by the professional organisations of each discipline. As disciplines have become more professional, most have promoted their own particular style guides: the APA [American Psychological Association], the MHRA [Modern Humanities Research Association], etc.. The proliferation – indeed balkanisation – of citation systems also reflects the information revolution and the rise of personal computers. Students and researchers are now expected to do their own typing, copy-editing, proof-reading and compositing. Footnotes, once the preserve of print-trade professionals, are now everybody's business.
[1] Manual of Style: A Compilation of Typographical Rules Governing the Publications of the University of Chicago, with Specimens of Types Used at the University Press, 3rd edn (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, [1911]), pp. 83-86.
