Back matter · Colophon
Of this edition.
A book that will not say how it was made is hiding something. This one closes the old way, with its types, its figures, its press and its hands stated in full.
The display is set in Fraunces, the text in EB Garamond, the captions in Space Grotesk and the apparatus in Space Mono: fourteen woff2 subsets, all cut under the Open Font License and served from this shelf, never fetched from another house. The text keeps its elzevir numerals.
Every figure in the book (rose, ship, dividers, staff, wave, lighthouse, anchor, match) is one word, repeated until it holds the shape, set live on a canvas by a single engine. No photographs of things; the paintings are Oswald Achenbach’s oils of 1883–84 and Flammarion’s engraving of 1888, public domain, gently set back in motion. The earth on the frontispiece is not painted at all: it is traced ray by ray in your own browser, four shells about a small night sky, and the only skin it wears, the sea, is the author’s. The instruments are drawn otherwise: each by its own model, in your browser, with its sources on the page.
Hand-set: no framework, nothing compiled, no cookies, no analytics, no tracking of any kind. Static leaves, served plain; six small hand-press scripts do the collating: the Logbook’s index, the family leaves, the position, the Italian edition, which is struck from the English leaves so the two can never drift apart, the edition stamp, which tells a returning reader’s browser that the leaves have changed, and a last pass that takes the workshop notes out of the leaves and sets the apostrophes before they are served. Nothing on any leaf calls out to anyone: the sun on the position is worked in your own browser, from the chart and your own clock, because a figure taken from a stranger’s service is a figure that tells the stranger you were reading. The turning of a page is the browser’s own view transition; a passage of the Logbook can be cited and carried whole; and the volume, printed, comes out an A5 chapbook with running heads and folios.
The forme of this edition went to the composing stone two hundred and sixty-odd times between the ninth of July and the first of August, MMXXVI: eleven days at the stone. Corrections are owned on the errata slip, never made silently.
Written, drawn and directed by Vincenzo Lambiase, medicine by day, machines by night. Composed with a tireless printer’s devil at the type-case (a machine, as it happens); every judgement, and every error, the author’s.
Avia pervia: the trackless ways are passable.
Salerno · MMXXVI · second impression