Colophon

Typographical

This web­site uses a few dif­ferent fonts:

One is Filosofia, designed in 1996 by Zuzana Licko and pub­lished by Emigre. I’m a huge fan of Licko’s designs; they feel to me like avatars of an age. I also love the fact that Emigre funded its iconic magazine with the sale of dig­ital fonts: one of the all-time great cross-subsidies.

Another is Trade Gothic Next, a 2008 revi­sion by Akira Kobayashi and Tom Grace of Jackson Burke’s 1947 design. I love fonts of this style, called “grotesque”. It was years ago that I learned the Star Wars opening crawl is set in, of all things, News Gothic; that’s what cracked them open for me.

For headlines, I use Stephen Nixon’s wild Kyrios: “a curious, slightly psy­che­delic black­letter family”!

Fic­tion is, when appropriate, pre­sented in my Perfect Edi­tion template, which uses Vollkorn, the “free and healthy type­face for bread and butter use” designed by Friedrich Althausen and pro­vided as a pro­found public good.

Technical

This web­site is man­aged using Mid­dleman, a static site gen­er­ator that’s simple and flex­ible and, most importantly, written in Ruby, which is the pro­gram­ming lan­guage I like best. My instal­la­tion of Mid­dleman is hot-rodded with all sorts of con­ve­niences and customizations, including many typo­graph­ical tune-ups.

I send emails using Buttondown, which I operate mainly through its ter­rific API, chore­o­graphing mes­sages with a Ruby script that I run on my laptop.

Style guide

I’ll note some pref­er­ences here, mostly for myself:

• Titles of books, periodicals, movies, etc., in plain text rather than italics.

• When a sen­tence ends in an ital­i­cized phrase fol­lowed by extrav­a­gant punctuation, italicize the punctuation, too!

• Email, but e-book. Website, but on second reference, site, sometimes. Web page, strangely. Web server. Mini-site. Data center. Home page. Home screen. Signup form, but sign up: you sign up with the signup form.

• Plugin, as in software.

• Multi­book project, not multi-book.

• Coworker, not co-worker.

• Reread, rewatch, redownload.

• Supercool, superfun.

• Crossfade.

• Minifridge.

• Yet robo-taxi, I think. Rob­o­taxi is just kinda ugly … 

• Side by side, not side-by-side. Likewise, book by book. Day to day. A theme emerges.

• A couple things, not a couple of things. I changed my mind about this one.

• Codename, not code name.

• Codebase, I suppose.

• Penumbraverse, not Penumbra-verse.

• Tiptoeing, not tip-toeing.

• Towards, not toward — which appears to be my instinct, anyway, so I’m leaving this judg­ment here to con­firm it, next time I wonder about this.

• Every­body rather than everyone. Some­body rather than someone.

• Style guides make the world go round, not ’round.

• Punc­tu­a­tion goes inside the quo­ta­tion marks for complete, stand­alone sen­tences; oth­er­wise it goes outside, in the UK style.

• Phrases fol­lowing a colon are almost never capitalized. Yes, even full sen­tences: who’s the boss here, anyway?

• Hony soyt qui mal pence, the Gawain spelling.

• Best­seller and bestselling, although of course it is the New York Times Best Sellers list — note Sellers, rather than Seller.

• Et al, rather than et al. — although it’s an abbreviation, stray periods of that kind are simply never attractive.

• Drop­ping the period from etc is also strongly under consideration.

• Mustardseed, not mus­tard seed, because we are always talking about the fairy, a little bit, as well as the bio­log­ical entity.

• A policy: “the the belongs to me.” Rather than tell you my writing has appeared in The Atlantic, I’d say it has appeared in the Atlantic, clawing the article back from the brand name, claiming it for my own statement. This applies most often to publications; in other cases (e.g. The White Stripes, The Ten Commandments), it’s fuzzier.

We’ll con­clude with a useful maxim:

January 2026, Oakland