This book contains a comprehensive listing of all The Table of Contents from all of my published books to date. It contains The Table of Contents from 27 books, all stringed together, sequentially. The title, TOC, is merely the modern usage of Table of Contents in acronym form.
If you view a book as the road map to a desired destination, the Table of Contents is the navigational compass that directs you to the information you need to find your ultimate destination. A good Table of Contents is the key to unlocking the quintessence of any book. It lays out the entire story of the book, its overarching themes, and its ultimate reason for being.
It is just as important for the Table of Contents to be organized in such a way as to lead the reader to find expected topics as it is for it to creatively reflect patterns of thought and meter that the reader knows nothing about, and is thus engaged in reading to discover. Therefore, The Table of Contents has its own rhythms and tempos in the same way that a good song or symphonic score has.
Towards this end, The Table of Contents helps the author to lead the reader into desired revelations and conclusions, which are derived just as much from the way in which the topics of a book are ordered, layered, and presented as much as the content of those topics, themselves.
Subsequently, creating a Table of Contents is far more and art than a science. There is no one correct answer in this art. Every author presents and orders topics differently, and no one-size-fits-all solution exits, as if every book was a 5th grade book on Early Mesopotamian History.
In the most general sense, The Table of Contents works to allow the reader to easily target and find specific arguments and topics, go directly to them, and waste little time in research and discovery. But in a larger sense, The Table of Contents enables the reader to see bigger patterns in thought and theme, which points to a far bigger picture than each topic might reveal, alone.
I have chosen to create my own style of TOC, where I employ multiple kinds of font sizes, typefaces, spacings, indenting, and formatting in order to direct the reader to those ideas that I feel need to be emphasized the most, as well as connect certain thoughts and themes to other paragraphs, chapters, or even other books that I have written.
Additionally, I repeat certain topics from book to book in order to assist in generating and anchoring a fundamental underlying theme to my collected works. Subsequently, I repeatedly bring certain ideas and themes to the reader's attention by use of font size, content repetition, and formatting, which ultimately results in betraying the specific significance and importance of any given topic in the larger context of my collected works.
Lastly, I revisit certain writings that I have done, again and again, as is reflected in various Table of Contents, so that each book may exist as a kind of "stand alone" resource that gives the entire meaning and essence of my work, even though any one particular book may simply concentrate and emphasize a specific facet of the comprehensive overarching theme of my collected works.