The 85 Ways to Tie a Tie The Sci­ence and Aes­thet­ics of Tie Knots
Broad­way 2000World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Long cloth ties are today found through­out the world around men’s necks (and some­times those of women as well). Other types of neck­wear are of course worn for cer­tain occa­sions (bow ties with tuxe­dos) or in cer­tain regions (string or bolo ties in the Amer­i­can South­west), but none matches the long tie in its ubiquity.

But, if you ask most any tie-wearing man (includ­ing me) how many dif­fer­ent tie knots they use, the answer will be “one.” Usu­ally that one knot is the four-in-hand, and a fair num­ber of peo­ple are aware of the exis­tence of another knot or two: the Wind­sor or half-Windsor, although these are­ich less com­monly used.

Surely, though, there are more than three ways to tie a tie. Thomas Fink and Yong Mao, two Cam­bridge the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cists, decided, appar­ently on a whim, to devote their con­sid­er­able tal­ents to dis­cov­er­ing all the pos­si­ble (an prac­ti­cal) tie knots. Once they real­ized that tie knots are “equiv­a­lent to per­sis­tant ran­dom walks on a tri­an­gu­lar lat­tice” (an obser­va­tion that Is evi­dently a rather sim­ple leap for a pair of physi­cists), it was a sim­ple mat­ter to math­e­mat­i­cally derive 85 dif­fer­ent ways to tie a tie.

Fink and Mao begin their book with a short his­tory of men’s neck­wear. The ear­li­est exam­ples of knot­ted neck cloths they cite are those adorn­ing the 7500 ter­ra­cotta sol­diers found in the tomb of China’s first emperor. Other early exam­ples come from Rome in the sec­ond cen­tury A.D., but dec­o­ra­tive men’s neck cloths seem not to have really caught on until the sev­en­teenth cen­tury. From that point until the early twen­ti­eth cen­tury (when long ties became de rigeur) a suc­ces­sion of neck cloth styles devel­oped in Europe: cra­vats, stocks, bow ties, Ascots, etc.

A sec­ond intro­duc­tory chap­ter is devoted to knots and knot the­ory. The authors pro­vide a basic overview of the tech­ni­cal aspects of knots and knot tying and of his­tor­i­cal attempts to ennu­mer­ate and cat­e­go­rize knots. They then explain in detail their own the­ory of tie knots. They lay out both the tech­ni­cal lim­i­ta­tions of tie knots (the tie must pass around the neck, and all knots must be ter­mi­nated such that the two ends hang down­wards) as well as the aes­thetic con­sid­er­a­tions (size, shape, sym­me­try, and balance).

The third chap­ter forms the meat of the book. In it, Fink and Mao ennu­mer­ate their 85 knots, orga­nized by the num­ber of moves it takes to com­plete each one. Each knot is accom­pa­nied by a step-by-step tying dia­gram and notes about how it relates to other knots, when appro­pri­ate. The thir­teen knits that the authors deem most aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing are dis­cussed at greater length, and are illus­trated with pho­tographs of well-known men sport­ing them. Among this sub­set of knots are, of course, the famil­iar four-in-hand, Wind­sor, and half-Windsor.

The 85 Ways to Tie a Tie is a delight­fully whim­si­cal lit­tle book, quin­tes­sen­tially British in it’s sub­ject mat­ter, tone, and humor. The authors man­age to explain what turns out to be a sur­pris­ingly com­plex prob­lem in a way that’s pretty easy to under­stand. For those read­ers who desire a more pre­cise expla­na­tion, Fink and Mao sup­ply am appen­dix chock full of for­mu­las and deriv­a­tives. The book con­tains plenty of pho­tographs, illus­tra­tions, and dia­grams, which are quite help­ful in under­stand­ing the his­tory, knot the­ory, and all the knot variations.

This book is less than ten years old, but it us already out of print and used copies go for fifty dol­lars or more. I got my hands on a copy via Inter­li­brary Loan. But, if you’d just like a quick overview and a list of all 85 knots with direc­tions, Thomas Fink pro­vides them on his web site.