A Few Suggestions to McGraw-Hill Authors. / Details of manuscript preparation, typograpy, proof-reading and other matters in the production of manuscripts and books.

by McGraw-Hill Publishing Company

Some Details of Typography.—For classroom use the majority of teachers seem to prefer to have the side-headings numbered consecutively throughout the book.

Tables and illustrations should be numbered consecutively throughout the book but in separate series. Tables should have an appropriate caption above, and, generally speaking, illustrations should have a descriptive legend below. Tables should be arranged, if possible, so that they can be printed across the page.

When equations and formulas are numerous, and especially in books designed for classroom use, it is often advantageous to number them consecutively throughout the text.

For chapters and tables roman numerals should be used; for all other series, arabic.

Excerpts from the works of other authors (when they are more than a phrase or sentence), problems, examples and test questions are generally set in smaller type than the body of the text itself. Accordingly they should be clearly marked.

Bibliographies.—Bibliographic references by footnotes serve in most books. Bibliographies of greater extent should be arranged alphabetically at the end of each chapter of the book, or numbered serially and referred to by numbers in the text. The custom is to print the titles of books in roman and the titles of periodicals in italics. Abbreviations should conform to the well-established style sheets of technical societies. We recommend particularly the abbreviations of:

Engineering Index		Issued by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 29 West 39th Street, New York.
Chemical Abstracts		Issued by the American Chemical Society, 1709 G Street, N. W., Washington, D. C.
Botanical Abstracts		Issued by the Board of Control of Botanical Abstracts, Dr. Donald Reddick, Business Manager, Cornell University, Ithaca, N. Y.
The Zoological Record		Issued by the Zoological Society of London, Regent's Park, London.
The International Catalogue of Scientific Literature		Issued by the Royal Society of London.

The extent of the bibliography will vary, of course, with the nature of the subject and the treatment. The tendency to-day appears to be toward rather excessive bibliographies, which do not seem to us generally to be justified. For a simple rule, we recommend "bibliographies of easily accessible sources."

Tables of Contents.—Detailed tables of contents to run in the front of the book serve a useful purpose. They should, however, be kept down to reasonable limits.