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Subject:Re: Sean Brierley's Preface Question From:Kelley Sheppard <ksheppar -at- mailbox1 -dot- tcfbank -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com Date:Thu, 07 Oct 1999 11:21:29 -0500
Sean, are your books revised regularly, with only parts of the book and
the TOC being republished
(perhaps with the number of pages in the TOC increasing with each
revision)? If so, that could be a good reason to part from tradition on
this.
Jo's citation is, of course, absolutely correct. However, we revised a
manual a few years ago, and we
decided to place the intro/preface at the beginning of the book, so we
wouldn't have to republish it every time we
revised the manual. We weren't really happy about doing it that way,
but it was a cost-cutting measure. (The
book is a 2000-page reference manual used in five states, and we have to
revise something in it almost every
month. We use a 3-part page-numbering format, e.g., 3.5.12, in the
individual chapters.)
Since we republish the revised master TOC with each revision, we would
usually have to republish the introduction
(even if it hadn't changed), if it came after the TOC, because the
manual and the TOC just keep growing (we
followed the convention of numbering all front-matter pages in
lower-case Roman numerals).
Soooo, we placed the intro right up front, starting on page number i,
and the TOC starts after that. If you're
going to produce a lot of hard copy per year, it may make sense to bend
the rules on this. Besides, don't you
think it's fun to occasionally break the rules, just as long as you know
what they are? ;)
Jo Baer wrote:
According to the Chicago Manual of Style (14th edition) the preface
follows the TOC. Chicago lists the parts of a book in this order.
1. Book half title
2. Series title, list of contributors, frontispiece, or blank page
3. Title page
4. Copyright notice, publisher's agencies, pringitn history, country
where printed, ISBN, CIP
5. Dedication or epigraph
6. Blank page
7. Table of contents
8. List of illustrations
9. List of tables
10. Foreword
11. Preface
12. Acknowledgments (if not part of preface)
13. Introduction (if not part of text)
14. List of abbreviations or chronology
15. Text
16. Appendix(ss)
17. Notes
18. Glossary
19. Bibliography
20. List of contributors
21. Index(es)
Brierley, Sean wrote:
>
<snip>
>
> I put the preface before the TOC, in my books. The main reason I do
this is
> because that's the way it was done before I got here. I am
considering
> changing this, to put the preface after the TOC,
<snip>
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