Adventures in editing, plus a love song to the semicolon

How many tabs can I simultaneously keep open at the top of my browser screen? As I begin the long process of editing essays submitted for the anthology I'm assembling, I find myself needing to refer repeatedly to Merriam-Webster (which is the preferred spelling, wacky or whacky?), the MLA Style Center (when do I need a suspended hyphen in late-nineteenth- to early-twentieth-century?), and the style guide for this specific book series (subheads: boldface or not?). I think I know MLA style pretty well, but the questions that come up in editing a collection of scholarly essays are more complicated than those I generally encounter in student work.

Fortunately, I'm the kind of person who gets a kick out of reading style guides, so all this attention to picky little details suits me just fine. I'm more concerned, frankly, about how to communicate with contributors, especially when substantive changes are needed. Educated people can disagree about placement of commas, but some scholars can take stylistic suggestions very personally. I'm trying to be diplomatic. I do not intend to get into any screaming matches over the suspended hyphen.

If only I could resort to poetry! In "His Love of Semicolons," Amit Majmudar elegantly defends a punctuation mark facing increasing neglect:

The comma is comely, the period, peerless,
        but stack them one atop
the other, and I am in love;...

I am in love, too, with the final line of the poem, which appears in two different versions. The online version ends with a full stop, but in his poetry collection Dothead, the line ends as it ought, with a semicolon. 

If I had to write elegant verse about every stylistic issue I encounter in editing these essays, I'd never get through them all, so I'm sticking to straightforward sentences in the indicative mood. No one is going to fall in love with my editorial suggestions as Majmudar fell in love with the semicolon, but as long as contributors don't scream at me, I'll be content.