Colophon

This site is made the way the notebook is: by hand, a little at a time. The pages are plain HTML, written in a text editor and edited directly. There is no framework, no build step, no database — just files. It loads fast because there is almost nothing to load.

What isn't here

No analytics, no cookies, no trackers, no fonts pulled from somewhere else watching who you are. Nothing on these pages phones home, because I don't want to know who reads them any more than the author of a paper book knows who is holding it. There is no comment box and no sign-up. If a passage moves you, the right place for your reply is your own margin.

Type & colour

Set in whatever serif your device already has — Iowan Old Style, Palatino, or plain Georgia — because a book should feel like the reader's, not the designer's. The paper is warm off-white by day and turns to dark of its own accord if your device prefers it. The single rust-coloured line down the left of each passage is the one indulgence: it is meant to be the red ruling old scribes drew in the margin.

Where it lives

On a small server I rent, quietly, the way you'd rent a locker. It is put in front of a content network so the pages arrive quickly wherever you are. That is the whole of the machinery.

The name

Almost everything here was copied out at night, at the end of the day, in the small circle of light a lamp throws on a page. That is the only hour I read the slow way this book is made of — a pen kept nearby, nothing else on. By Reading Light seemed right for it: a book put together in the last quiet hour, by the one lamp still burning.

Last tended: this spring. It will change again when a page is worth the copying.