· Vincenzo Lambiase · 1 min read
Every website I opened looked like the same website, and none of them looked like they expected to exist in ten years.
So this site is a treatise from about 1800. Not as a costume — as a set of constraints. A book cannot track you, so this site does not. A book cannot update silently, so corrections here go on a printed errata slip, with dates. A book expects margins, so you can write in mine: select a passage and the site offers you a pencil. Your notes never leave your browser, because the margins of your copy belong to you and not to me.
I wrote last time about what medicine does to your sense of pace. A book is the only interface I know that agrees with it, so I borrowed it whole: catchwords, folios, a ribbon that keeps your place, ship’s bells in the footer striking your own hour.
Much of the type here was set with a machine at the type-case — the tireless kind. Every judgement, every figure, every error is mine; the machine held the composing stick. I think that division of labour is the honest one, and I would rather declare it in the colophon than let you wonder.
If you want to test whether any of this is real: press print. An A5 chapbook comes out, testatine and folios and your marginalia included. A website that survives paper has stopped lying about what it is.
— entry no. 3