in descending order

The attentive reader will notice that catalogs such as the INVENTORY and the OUTLINE, arrange their contents in reverse chronological order — that is, the items descend from latest to earliest in terms of provenance.

However, in contrast to these global directories, the more intimate bookPlates, which list each individual Author's Writings, index them in ascending order, the sequence of their composition — insofar as this can be discerned.

This ingenious device reflects the embodiment of time we can observe in the natural world, where, for example, the side of a hill has been removed by construction or natural movement of the earth, thus exposing layers of different colors and consistencies, which represent the eras during which those strata were laid down. With this analogy in mind, perhaps, the unknown Redactor visualized the vertical dimension as measuring universal time, while the horizontal dimension shows us personal time.