Typographia, or The Printer's Instructor
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 book earns trust by declaring what it is not, opening with the charge that earlier manuals were little more than reprints of Smith's 1755 London grammar, which converts the reader's suspicion into a reason to prefer this one. The structure is the sales argument: history first to give the trade dignity, then department-by-department practice so the book maps onto the reader's actual working day. It admits its own excess, granting that beginners may find some passages prolix, and that concession buys credibility for the parts that are not. The diagrams do what prose cannot, printing the numbers reversed so the page is not an explanation of imposition but a template for it.
Steal this when
Steal this when you are selling a reference product into a field already full of derivative ones, and the differentiator is first-hand practice rather than new information. Name what the incumbents are, then organise your content by the reader's workflow instead of by topic.