Happy Jed
Method #89-Q of making Jed happy: ensure that he receives the new 15th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style in the mail. (Along with a Le Guin book—which I'm also very pleased about, but it's a used copy that isn't in as good condition as I was hoping for.)
I haven't spent a lot of time with the new Chicago yet. I'm fairly pleased with the new usage section, though the book no longer recommends the use of singular they. The body typeface (Scala) is nicer and more readable than the previous edition's (which was Linotron Times Roman) (though Scala is not as heavy/dark, so it has less contrast against the page background); the blue inline examples inserted into paragraphs in the usage section are a little distracting, but once I get used to them I may like them.
Much of the book is still devoted to details of production and citation, which I'm largely uninterested in, but I imagine it continues to be useful to production people and to academics. There's lots of new material about online stuff, including a section on citing online magazines; sadly, they don't recommend a way to set off URLs in text. I continue to feel that URLs in text reduce readability if they're not set off somehow, and all sorts of problems arise when they're followed by punctuation, but Chicago says: "Other punctuation marks [other than trailing slashes] used following a URL will readily be perceived as belonging to the surrounding text." I'm awfully dubious about that, especially in works intended for a non-technical audience; I'll probably continue to set them off with parentheses even when they're not parenthetical.
One of my few serious problems with the 14th edition was the index, which often seemed fairly arbitrary to me; we'll see whether the index in this new edition is better.
Really, that's all I can say about the volume in general; it'll take a while of using it to see what I think about it. But I'm pleased to have it anyway.