Abstract: This essay is devoted to a particular type of official handbooks that emerged around 1730, in which the contents of the Penal Code and of the regulations on “administrative sanctions” ( chu fen) w ere set in tables of varying complexity. The aim was to facilitate access to a corpus o f law s that w as both proliferating and constantly updated. Part One proposes a history of the genre by describing a series of works some of which were revised and reprinted through the end o f the nineteenth century. Them ilieu of administrative specialists that produced the authors, the practices of the publishers, and the targeted public are discussed along the way. Part Two discusses in more detail the logic of table presentation, in other words the various methods employed to abstract and reorganize the text of the legislative compendia to make them “plain at first glance.”