Here’s a link to a great article that was in the New Yorker I’ve been meaning to post for a while:
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?031006crbo_books1
Called “End Matter” and by Louis Menand, it’s a review of the new Chicago Manual of Style, but it’s really an essay about the whole business of “style,” particularly citation. I like this sentence from the end of the essay a lot: “The perfect manual of style would be like the perfect map of the world: exactly coterminous with its subject, containing a rule for every word of every sentence. We would need an extra universe to accommodate it. It would be worth it.”