Is it just me or is the Harvard/APA reference system comical when you have to create a reference to an old book “out of print” for hundred or thousand of years? Here is an example a an auto-generated reference created in the APA tradition:

Thinkers as Immanuel Kant has both mindsets and this duality is embedded in the title of his classic book Critique of Pure Reason (Kant & Meiklejohn, 2004).

And in the biliography / reference list:

Kant, I. & Meiklejohn, J. M. D. (2004). Critique of pure reason. Mineola, N.Y: Barnes & Noble.

I can’t stand this. It looks really stupid – if you know the original book was published in the end of the 18th century (1781). It’s quite easy to find a hack in this case. I can remove the reference entirely. It is not really needed here, but the problem remains the next time I reference something that actually is in the book and has to be referenced in a proper manner.

There are a lot of possible hacks and more proper solutions, but most of them doesn’t fit well with in a text based mostly on contemporarary references intertwined with a few references to these old “elephants”.