Sciolism Rocks

Every one of us has a job. I suspect it is common for the details of our everyday working lives, the minutia that consumes us and separates us from our theoretical job descriptions, are almost comical. These are the things that you can’t learn in a classroom. These are the things that make up “the real world”. They are things that your eight-year-old nephew wouldn’t believe a grown man could do for a living.

Take, for example, this slideshow of Thirty Tables of Contents, which highlights an under appreciated yet indispensable section of anything longer than three pages. But don’t visit it quite yet.

I’ve spent many days thinking about exactly how I want my TOC’s to look. I’ve done okay, but have never reached the poetic lines of the best of this collection. Note, especially, number 8 in this collection. It’s from an amazing tome by Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style. It’s one of the few how-to books that I’ve felt compelled to read, whose prose actually pushed me through the work. Like with Atlas Shrugged, another book whose TOC is featured here, I would put Bringhurst in my book bag and mentally say “Don’t do anything until I get back to you.” If you’re in publishing and don’t own this book, put it on your Christmas list.

Before you look at the slideshow, I want you to think about an iconic table of contents. Said another way, when you purposefully think of a table of contents — the page itself, of no book in particular, but just the free-associated thing — what comes to your mind? What do you see? What don’t you see?

I’ll bet many of you see dots. Lots of them. Dots that, somewhere in the depths of typographic history, were meant to guide your eye from one side of the page to the other.

Called “leader dots” by those of us in the book biz, they create a startling (in a bad way)visual effect even when aligned correctly. When poorly composited, they produce rivers of white and islands of black that make me dizzy. In fact, I often perceive them as physically moving.

Additionally, your ideated table of contents probably had the page numbers listed one atop the other, as if they were an arithmetic problem created by a sadistic accountant. There’s little need for their alignment (or, more specifically, their alignment with each other), because we aren’t going to be adding them up. The correspondence you want is from the book chapter to its page. The goal of the TOC is to give you that correspondence.

More philosophically, the TOC is a glance at the work itself. It’s the real first impression of a text, since we all know that the cover is not something that one can judge a book by. But we can (which means, I do) often make judgements about a text from its table of contents. It is a summary, a style, a choice. It’s the haircut and glasses of a text. It’s the little bit of glitter at the corner of a smile that makes you look twice. It matters.

So it must be a joke that the TOC for Thirty Tables of Contents violates both my fundamental rules.

In honor of my friend Kate, who freely vandalizes poor public punctuation, I took it upon myself to correct all our placemats at a café in Vincennes, France. Have a look:

In this ad for Perrier water, they’ve freely sprinkled descriptive nouns on some of their bubbles. Look at the one closest to the bottom.

They screwed up their accent! I’ts not légéreté, it’s légèreté.

Zut alors!