Beautifully designed Tables of Contents
DesignObserver's put together a great book/slideshow/Flickr group of beautiful table of contents pages from various books:
Link (via Kottke)
In this book, we have gathered together thirty Table of Contents pages from our personal collections. On the surface, the selection may elude standard organizational conceits: why a design collection that also includes poetry and fiction? Why Philip Larkin and not Billy Collins, Ayn Rand and not Philip Roth, Paul Rand and not Jan Tschichold? Like “next” itself, there’s no intentional logic or over-arching plan: we just found these examples engaging, the discrepancies between them even more so.Some readers will appreciate their typographic form, while others will see further strategies at work — informational, strategic, philosophical, literary. There are odd, even anachronistic cultural references, gestures that date these books in a manner oddly soothing. They remind us that what we will be has, by its very nature, a great deal to do with where we’ve been — and that there is no future without a past.
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It just ought to be pointed out that the example above is from Scott McCloud's seminal Understanding Comics. That a book so dedicated to exploring the potential of visual communication should have such a table of contents is no surprise.
I think Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum has a remarkable and unconventional table of contents, even if the typesetting is mundane. It is available for viewing at Amazon.
Rather disappointing link. Most of these examples aren't so much "designed" as "typeset".
You can have so much fun with a TOC design, but they are very easy to screw up. Magazines are where to look if you want to see some good (and bad) examples of TOC's. I always liked ESPN Magazine's. (Sorry no link, but if you're reading this at Brains & Noble, pick one up and see for yourself.)
Very true about McCloud. A lot of the tables of contents collected here contain great expression in their typography. I had to go through a few times to figure out why some were included depending on typeface and ground relationships vs. content or date of publication. Kind of like a brainteaser.