Q. Apologies if this is answered somewhere in the Manual; I don’t see it in the section under Place of Publication. My question: when the place of publication no longer exists, because the city has been renamed or has been absorbed into a larger municipality, how should we cite the place of publication? (Similarly, for books that indicate an alternate English version of the city name, should we use the city name as given, or the more modern/contemporary spelling—e.g., Peking vs. Beijing, Canton vs. Guangzhou, Bombay vs. Mumbai)?
A. CMOS recommends citing the city where the work was published (paragraph 14.129); you can usually find it on the title page or copyright page. You are documenting a historical fact of publication; the subsequent history of that city or variations of its name are irrelevant. Of course, it’s always an option to annotate a citation with information you think readers need or would appreciate. Please see figure 14.10 for an annotation to a bibliography entry.