Ian Fieggen's Web site and book about shoelaces (unlike most instruction manuals) are miracles of clarity. How else would you know the optimal lace length for your walking shoes is 39.7 inches?

What possesses a person to write a whole book about shoelaces? Monomania was my first guess, but Ian Fieggen claims he isn't a shoelace obsessive.

He says he only started his shoelace Web site because he "could see that there was a real need," he says. "No one else had added anything much to the Internet" — about shoelaces, he presumably means — "either because they didn't have the required illustration skills or because there simply wasn't any money in it. I was happy to do so simply for the sake of contributing something worthwhile to the community."

Fieggen's Web site shows you 33 different ways to lace your shoes, 15 different ways to tie them, eight ways to make your own aglets (the little tubular plastic tips that tend to crack and come off), how to compute the length of lace required to lace up a particular shoe, what to do about slipping laces, how to correct asymmetrical knots, how to prevent your shoelaces from digging into your tender insteps, and much, much, much more about shoelaces than the average person probably has any desire to know.

Now Fieggen's Web site is also a book: "Laces: 100s of Ways to Pimp Your Kicks." And, though I hesitate to say so, I suspect it's that rare phenomenon, a thing perfect of its kind.

The design is brilliant. The fold over cover looks a lot like the front of a black Chuck Taylor low-top, with two canvas flaps each equipped with six working eyelets, so you can practice the 33 different ways of lacing your shoes.

You can make your laces look like stars, train tracks, lightning bolts, latticework, spiderwebs, checkerboards.

You can ladder-lace them the way paratroopers do to keep their boots nice and tight. You can lace them with two different colours of laces at once for even more gorgeous effects.

Even better, the cover folds over any left-hand page, and the individual lacing diagrams appear only on right-hand pages, so there's no annoying flipping back and forth while you're practicing — with the practice laces provided in a plastic envelope at the back of the book.

And better yet, the diagrams are so clear as to be instantly comprehensible.

Truly, if you've ever agonised over inscrutable diagrams that purport to show you how your new snap-together floor tiles are meant to snap together, or how you're supposed to assemble your "some assembly required" barbecue grill, you will be astonished by the limpid clarity of Fieggen's diagrams — and then angry.

Unless it's just me: The lucidity of his diagrams, and the clarity of the accompanying instructions, left me seething with envy. I'd like to send his book — along with a scathing note — to whoever wrote the enigmatic 160-page manual that came with my digital camera.

Not to forget the person who wrote the directions for my combination printer-fax-phone (so incomprehensible I had to give up and buy a new one).

Also, the author of the instructions for programming our new flat-screen TV. And several more writers of crucial but utterly confounding manuals.

It seems somehow unfair that there exist such clear, simple instructions for lacing your shoes 33 different ways — something I have no desire to do — when the instructions for doing things I desperately need to be able to do (fax from the computer, switch the camera to close-up mode, access the extra hard drive from the laptop, persuade the TV to recognise the DVR) make no sense at all.

I was a little dubious, initially, about Fieggen's formulas for calculating proper shoelace length, which require you to measure both the horizontal and vertical distances between eyelets, and also to remember what the square root symbol means, and how to interpret parentheses in equations. Fieggen unapologetically admits that the formulas "are WAY more complex than most people would imagine!"

But they do work — and they provided me with the first opportunity in recent memory to use the square root function on my calculator. (Or you can go to his Web site, which will do the calculating for you.)

It's worth doing, one way or the other. I'm usually baffled when it comes to picking a length. I'm in the store, the shoes that need laces are at home, and how am I supposed to remember how many eyelets they have?

Even if you can remember, Fieggen says the standard recommendations (of, say, 40-inch laces for shoes with six or seven sets of eyelets) are woefully imprecise.

Using his calculator, I was able to determine that the optimal length of lace for my walking shoes, which had been making do with disreputable-looking, way-too-long, way-too-thick old bootlaces, is 39.7 inches. Not that the CVS around the corner had a pair of 39.7-inch laces — or a pair of 40-inch laces, either, so I tried both 45-inch laces.

They turned out to be almost as ridiculously too-long as the ones I was using, while the 36-inch laces, which escape from the top two sets of lugs when you put the shoes on, work fine once they're tied.

www.fieggen.com/shoelace