The archive

Pick the line length first. The typeface, the size, the leading and the margins are all downstream of it, and most bad pages started somewhere else.

The one material in printing that nobody photographs, and what it does to a press day.

I reread one novel every January. What eleven passes have actually changed, and why the book is now an instrument rather than a story.

Three ways to get rid of a stranded line, two of which lie to the reader, and what happens to the problem once there are no pages at all.

A proof is not a preview. It is the only place certain mistakes are visible at all, and the second one matters more than the first.

Text figures sit down inside a line of prose. Lining figures stand up like capitals. Most pages use the wrong one in at least one place.

What was in the fourth cabinet, why the incomplete fonts are the interesting ones, and the split W I will not repair.

Why the reading changes when the light does, and the small ritual I keep on the first Sunday in January.

What survives in a paper notebook that does not survive in a file, and why the thing I most value about it is that it cannot be searched.

Why the outer margin is wider than the inner, why the bottom is the biggest of all, and what happens when a page is designed by someone counting paper.