Rick Rubin Wanted 78 Chapters to Match the Tarot, Then the Extras Vanished

In Italy, the day after a conversation about the book, Rick Rubin, the music producer and author of The Creative Act, got a strange report from his assistant.

Dylan had put all the sections in order. "It's the weirdest thing. I put them in order, and there are 78 sections," he said.

Rubin told him that could not be right. There had been 83 the day before. Dylan answered, "There are no others."

The count fell overnight, with no one cutting anything. Rubin had wanted 78 because the tarot deck has 78 cards. After eight years of work, he had decided the number of sections should refer to something outside the book.

The book had started as a shapeless mass of ideas, more than 1,400 pages built up over years of failed attempts at organization. Rubin distilled his thinking into what he calls areas of thought, short essays that can be read on their own. At first he had 63 of them, handwritten and kept as a photograph in his phone.

Once he sorted all the material into those 63 buckets, the collection kept growing. By the time the manuscript was finished and everybody was happy, there were 83 or 84.

Then Rubin called his collaborator Neil, a writer friend from his neighborhood who had helped with the book from the beginning. Rubin said the book was done, but he would rather it be 78.

Neil thought he had lost his mind. "You're insane," he said. "You've been working on this book for eight years. Now you want it to be randomly 78 instead of 83? It's good. Be happy it's good. Be done."

Rubin insisted. Rubin said, "I want it to have a reference to something else in the world of a number," and the tarot cards are 78. When asked why, he said it was just a feeling. He also described 108 and 144 as other examples of good numbers.

So Dylan assembled the 83 sections in Rubin's chosen order in Italy. Rubin said, "And the next day there were 78, and nobody did anything." Rubin says nobody knows where the extras went.