NEVER GOING OUT OF STYLE may be the key element of style, and the long-lived little book pictured at left certainly has that covered. Its 4th edition was published in 1999, an illustrated edition came out in 2005 and now Coyote Canyon Press is about to release the original “Elements of Style” as penned and privately published by Cornell University English Prof. William Strunk, Jr. in 1918. The book, which was revised in 1935 with the help of Edward A. Tenny, and then memorably in 1957 by Strunk’s former student, the legendary New Yorker writer and editor E. B. White, has tutored generations of undergrads and overgrads in the art of good, spare writing (“The adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place.”) The ultimate test of the book’s longevity is that one recent morning it was ranked 74th on the Amazon best-seller list. Now that’s legs!
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