“I hate the guts of English grammar,” an illustrious stylist once wrote. Reader, perhaps you can relate. But would you believe it if I told you the writer was E. B. White, as in half of Strunk and White, those august ambassadors of precision and clarity behind “The Elements of Style”? This grain of wit is one among many unearthed by Mark Garvey in “Stylized,” his “slightly obsessive” history of “Elements,” which is much more than basic history and undeniably obsessive.

Garvey, a writer and editor apparently drawn to minutiae (a previous book was “Come Together: The Official John Lennon Educational Tour Bus Guide to Music and Video”), gives us Strunk’s and White’s lives and credos; a meticu­lous record of “Elements” emendations; a survey of the shifting theoretical winds in English departments; expositions on the morality of writing — a whole lot for a 200-page book. (Then again, “Elements” is no lightweight tract, and it is half as long.)

Many people already know that in 1957, White received from a friend a 43-page version of “Elements,” which William Strunk Jr., a professor of his at Cornell, had self-published in 1918. In a “Letter From the East,” White introduced New Yorker readers to what was known on campus as “ ‘the little book’ . . . stress on the word ‘little.’ ” It was meant to relieve the tedium of correcting papers (teachers could jot in the margins “See Rule 9!”). White admired “Elements” for the “audacity” of its author, for its “clear, brief, bold” advice leavened by “Strunkian humor.”

But now we have the full back story. Strunk, a philologist versed in Sanskrit, Icelandic, Old Bulgarian and “the history of French verbs,” met White, a gifted student with no time for dreary courses — he got a D in English before finding Strunk — in 1919. Kindred spirits who talked shop while sipping “shandygaff” (diluted beer), they stayed in touch as White’s star rose, until Strunk’s death in 1946.