Order from Chaos
19 Jun. 2008
I'm absolutely fascinated by the structure of older books. Books written before typewriters and computers. I'm looking at my copy of Democracy in America right now, for instance. The table of contents for Chapter 15 looks like this:
254 _ Unlimited Power of the Majority in the United States, and Its Consequences
257 _ How the omnipotence of the majority increases, in America, the instability of legislation and administration inherent in democracy
258 _ Tyranny of the majority
262 _ Effects of the omnipotence of the majority upon the arbitrary authority of American public officers
263 _ Power exercised by the majority in America upon opinion
265 _ Effects of the tyranny of the majority upon the national character of the Americans. - The courtier spirit in the United States
268 _ The greatest dangers of the American republics proceed from the omnipotence of the majority
The amount of information contained in each headline here is boggling to me, used, as I am, to terse and non-helpful subsections (if they exist at all) in modern book-length works. In essence, the table of contents here is what we now consider an outline - something to be done in prewriting stages but never actually shown to the reader in the completed work. And yet as shown here it makes the structure of the document, its theses and points and major themes, immediately obvious to the reader. As a designer...as a reader...as an impatient bitch...I fucking love this with every fiber of my tiny being.
It also breaks the text up into tiny, digestible chunks (notice how none of these subsections is more than a few pages at most...some not even a full page) - if I turn to any of these pages in the book, each subsection actually begins with the headline given above and is set so as to obviously indicate the start of a new section. And this makes me think of a recent discussion on the AoIR listserv in which several participants cited an Atlantic Monthly article lamenting the death of reading (yes, yet another of those goddamned 'reading is dead' articles). The gist of the article this time was that the Internet has changed reading for the worse - instead of digging into a long, windy, excessive book with loving OCD, the author now finds himself impatient with verbose crap and just wants to get to the heart of things already.*
Now - assuming for a moment that people are, in fact, expressing more impatience with what they read - could it not be because what people read is being more poorly written? Not that people are becoming more impatient or changing "how" they read? I look at the outline form used above, and it seems to me that it actually makes reading longer works of nonfiction seem significantly speedier. The design of the work means that you are getting slapped upside the head with the point. There's no hunting, wondering, head scratching, or going back to re-read. It's written linearly (something rare in modern works), the main points are immediately obvious and accessible (again - rare in modern works), and it's broken into smaller chunks that are more easily digestible.
In other words....older books are an awful lot like what is supposedly so terrible about reading on the web.
* Note: I adore reading and yet I have never enjoyed reading long winded bitches who fail to get to the point. It's one thing to read a novel that circumnavigates the globe ten times, but I have never, ever had the patience to read a work of nonfiction that does that. Has this author actually enjoyed reading long nonfiction in the past? Or are they confusing reading novels for pleasure with reading reference for pleasure? Seriously. I've just gotta ask. Did this dude really enjoy that once upon a time when he walked uphill to school in the snow both ways? 'Cause that would be really....'interesting.'