How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Charles van Doren Page A

not known it before. Reading the title, in other words, could have given them essential information about the book before they started to read it; but they had failed to do that, as most people fail to do even with an unfamiliar book.
    One reason why titles and prefaces are ignored by many readers is that they do not think it important to classify the book they are reading. They do not follow this first rule of analytical reading. If they tried to follow it, they would be grateful to the author for helping them. Obviously, the author thinks it is important for the reader to know the kind of book he is being given. That is why he goes to the trouble of making it plain in the preface, and usually tries to make his title-or at least his subtitle-descriptive. Thus, Einstein and Infeld, in their preface to The Evolution of Physics, tell the reader that they expect him to know "that a scientific book, even though popular, must not be read in the same way as a novel." They also construct an analytical table of contents to advise the reader in advance of the details of their treatment.
    In any event, the chapter headings listed in the front serve the purpose of amplifying the significance of the main title.
    The reader who ignores all these things has only himself to blame if he is puzzled by the question, What kind of book is this? He is going to become more perplexed. If he cannot answer that question, and if he never asks it of himself, he is going to be unable to answer a lot of other questions about the book.
    Important as reading titles is, it is not enough. The clearest titles in the world, the most explicit front matter, will not help you to classify a book unless you have the broad lines of classification already in your mind.
    You will not know the sense in which Euclid's Elements of Geometry and William James' Principles of Psychology are books of the same sort if you do not know that psychology and geometry are both sciences-and, incidentally, if you do not know that "elements" and "principles" mean much the same thing in these two titles (though not in general) , nor will you further be able to distinguish them as different unless you know there are different kinds of science. Similarly, in the case of Aristotle's Politics and Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, you can tell how these books are alike and different only if you know what a practical problem is, and what different kinds of practical problems there are.
    Titles sometimes make the grouping of books easy. Anyone would know that Euclid's Elements, Descartes' Geometry, and Hilbert's Foundations of Geometry are three mathematical books, more or less closely related in subject matter. This is not always the case. It might not be so easy to tell from the titles that Augustine's The City of God, Hobbe's Leviathan, and Rousseau's Social Contract are political treatises, although a careful perusal of their chapter headings would reveal the problems that are common to these three books.
    Again, however, to group books as being of the same kind is not enough; to follow this first rule of reading you must know what that kind is. The title will not tell you, nor all the rest of the front matter, nor even the whole book itself sometimes, unless you have some categories you can apply to classify books intelligently. In other words, this rule has to be made a little more intelligible if you are to follow it intelligently. It can only be made intelligible by drawing distinctions and thus creating categories that make sense and will stand up to the test of time.
    We have already discussed a rough classification of books.
    The main distinction, we said, was between works of fiction, on the one hand, and works conveying knowledge, or works, on the other hand. Among expository works, we can further distinguish history from philosophy, and both from science and mathematics.
    Now this is all very well as far as it goes. This is a classification scheme with fairly perspicuous