A couple of days ago a book called "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" was glowingly reviewed on Slashdot. It was described as the definitive work on making effective charts and graphs, from a rather more enlightened perspective than your typical modern-day guide to expressing every piece of information in the world using Excel. I thought it might be a good purchase for my workplace, since we are in the process of making many complex measurements to be put into reports to the military and National Science Foundation. I was shocked upon visiting bn.com to see that the book's overall sales rank was 95. It seemed like a cool book, but surely the visual presentation of data is not something that interests that many people. Then I remembered the Slashdot effect, and added one to the book's sales.

Yesterday at work I was in the elevator and thought about how great it was that due to B&N's super-quick Manhattan shipping we would probably have the book that day. Then I glanced up at the other elevator passenger and noticed he was carrying a box. Inexplicably curious, I looked a bit closer and saw that it was bound for our office. When we got out the guy was understandably confused about where to go, and I thought about directing him myself, but didn't want to freak him out. Instead I walked quickly back to the office and said to my coworkers that I had a hunch we'd be getting that book soon, a prediction that was briskly vindicated.

It is truly a wonderful book, and deserves a high sales rank (it now stands at 371). Its subject may sound dull, but the author brings a skill for storytelling and a dry wit to it, and of course plenty of illustrations, including many beautiful hand-drawn ones. An interesting aspect of his manifesto is that these are not things which should necessarily be immediately appreciable without thinking. They should be easier to understand than the array of numbers they represent, revealing patterns among the details, but he accuses most mainstream newspapers, especially American ones, of underestimating the intelligence of their readers when they design charts. Another fun note, the Japanese are extremely enthusiastic about statistics and graphs thereof, so much so that they have national chartmaking competitions for children. The book itself is also quite a work of art, and naturally exemplifies the many principles set out within. So we should have some very interesting Chartsengrafs coming out of RST soon.