Blue Ocean cover

The Contents Book is a type of a self-referential book which consists of a table of contents which references itself.

Typically, each page will list an arbitrary amount of Chapters, each of which will describe the contents of the chapters being the current contents page, for instance: “Chapter 2. Table of contents, page 2.”, “Chapter 3. Table of contents, page 2.”, “Chapter 4. Table of contents, page 2.”, etc.

Chapters might also have names, which mint hint at a story, but still link the reader to the table of contents rather than anything else.

Blue Ocean by Louigi Verona is a classical self-referential book.