Publishers seem to have hit on a winning formula for non-fiction books in recent years. Take a seemingly esoteric subject, mix in lots of history, add plenty of anecdotes, keep it short, and print the book in a nice, compact form with expensive paper and lots of arty pictures. The best-selling Longitude by Dava Sobel led the way, and now her publishers — Fourth Estate — have repeated the magic with this book on the physics of tie knots.

It’s a brilliant idea for a book. Thomas Fink and Yong Mao are condensed-matter theorists at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, and their work on tying knots made headlines around the world last year after it was published in Nature (1999 398 31). Using ideas from statistical mechanics, they worked out that there are 85 ways to tie a necktie. However, only 13 of these knots were deemed to be aesthetic on the grounds of “symmetry” and “balance”. Three of these – the Windsor, the half-Windsor and the four-in-hand – were already widely known, while a fourth, dubbed the Nicky, was found to be a simpler version of the unaesthetic “Pratt”, which was invented to much acclaim in 1989. This left nine brand new ways to tie a tie.

This book provides a full description of how to tie each of the 85 ties, with glossy pictures of the 13 aesthetic ties. There is a history of tie-wearing – the Duke of Windsor apparently did not invent the Windsor – and a brief discussion of the science of knots. There are also some (rather grainy) pictures of various celebrities wearing ties — Ernest Rutherford, it seems, favoured the four-in-hand.

So rather than publishing what could have been a straightforward but possibly dull book about the science of knots, the authors have thought laterally to come up with an imaginative and clever book that must have had the publishers’ marketing executives licking their lips. Other physicists who think they have a book inside them could do well to study this book’s successful formula.