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215 REFERENCE LISTS
‘Cambridge’ will be understood as being ‘Cambridge, England’, so that you
will need to specify ‘Cambridge, Mass.’ or ‘Cambridge, MA’ for MIT Press or
Harvard University Press. The system of specifying states for American cities
is sometimes generalised, even when there is no ambiguity, though it is rarely
applied to the largest cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles or New York.
If your city of publication is one which has different names in different languages
(e.g. Munich and München; Venice, Venise, Venedig and Venezia), use consistently
either the version of the name that corresponds to the language in
which the book is published or the version which is used in the book itself.
Very occasionally you will not be able to find a place of publication, especially
in old books. On these occasions you can use the notion ‘n.p.’, standing
for ‘no place (given)’.
Publisher
We can roughly divide publishers into three groups: the big international conglomerates,
the university presses, and the small firms, sometimes still run by
an individual. Of course, the division is sometimes more apparent than real: the
Edward Arnold imprint is now owned by one of the big conglomerates. The
distinction may nevertheless be helpful.
For the big firms, you need to give the name of the firm, but without any
‘Inc.’, ‘Ltd.’, ‘& Co.’ or similar notation. So you write ‘Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich’ not ‘Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.’, even if the ‘Inc.’ is there in
the book. Note that the spelling and punctuation used by the firm is followed:
this particular publisher uses no commas, and so you should not do so either.
For university presses, you should always give the full title of the press as
mentioned in the book: very often the university press is a different commercial
body from the university to which it is nominally attached, and so should
not be confused with the university itself (although it takes part of its prestige
from the university it serves).
The smaller firms often have or had the name of the (original) owner of the
firm: Basil Blackwell, Edward Arnold, Gunter Narr, John Benjamins. Again
you should omit any mention of commercial status. You may use both the
names as the name of the publisher or you may use the family name alone, the
latter being more common.
Where you are faced with a publisher’s name in a foreign language which you
do not understand, you may simply have to copy out the whole thing, though
in principle the same rules apply.
Where things are less formally published it may be difficult to ascertain the
publisher. For instance, it may be the university department which issued the
volume or the society (for example, the International Phonetic Association or
the Philological Society) for whom the book was printed.