Hart's Rules is the oldest continuously updated style guide in the English language, providing advice on topics such as punctuation, citation, and typography. Printer and biographer Horace Hart first issued the work in 1893 for the compositors and readers of Oxford University Press (OUP). It has evolved through multiple editions to become one of the most influential works of its kind.
Origins
The first edition of Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford appeared in 1893, as a privately circulated 24-page booklet, printed on small-format blue card and issued without charge to staff of the Oxford University Press. Its compiler, Horace Hart (1840–1916), had been appointed Controller of the Press in 1883, tasked with modernizing what was then a struggling and bifurcated institution – divided between a commercially successful Bible Side and a faltering Learned Side. This marked the beginning of Hart's Rules as a commercial product. It soon came to be known and used well beyond Oxford, particularly by government departments and commercial printers.
Authority and influence
The success of Hart's Rules owed much to the growing prestige of the Oxford University Press and its most significant scholarly project of the era, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Hart worked closely with OED editors, especially James Murray and Henry Bradley, who reviewed and sanctioned the Rules, lending them significant academic authority.
Modern editions
In 2002, in lieu of a fortieth edition of Hart's Rules, Oxford University Press published an expanded successor as The Oxford Guide to Style. It also issued a volume combining this work with The Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors (the successor to the Authors' and Printers' Dictionary by Frederick Howard Collins) as The Oxford Style Manual. This marked a shift to a larger reference format and a broader editorial remit, encompassing a fuller range of digital and academic practices.
In 2005, an abridged edition of The Oxford Guide to Style appeared under the title New Hart's Rules, returning to the compact handbook format that had been characteristic of the work for most of its life. The most recent edition of this work appeared in 2014.
The press renamed the combined Oxford Style Manual as the New Oxford Style Manual to correspond with New Hart's Rules and the New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors, but the sequence of editions is continuous with that of the original Oxford Style Manual of 2003.
See also
- Fowler's Modern English Usage
- The King's English