The Practice of Typography: Correct Composition
The pattern
This still is filed under Craft-argument book.
Define
A book or manual that sells a method by arguing it. Chapters as proof, not as decoration around a product.
Mechanism
Authority by treatise. The reader who accepts the argument has already accepted the seller as teacher.
Verdict
We can teach a craft in public and the teaching is the funnel.
Why it works
The structure is authority-by-exhaustion. De Vinne opens the preface by admitting there is no final authority, which disarms the reader's objection before it forms, then spends 494 pages becoming the authority by sheer coverage of cases nobody else had catalogued. The running heads are the real navigation device: each one is a complete claim, so a compositor with a question in hand can flip pages and read only the headline strip until it matches his problem. And the book demonstrates its own rules in its own setting, so every page is simultaneously instruction and proof.
Steal this when
Steal this when you are writing the standards document for a craft that has no governing body and you want your version to become the default. Admit the absence of authority up front, then win by covering more edge cases than anyone else and by making the artifact itself obey the rules it teaches.