There is a particular silence that descends upon a page once the type has been set and the proofs pulled. It is the silence of decision, of arrangement, of the editor's hand finally withdrawn. Each line measured to the em, each kerning pair adjudicated, each widow chased from the foot of the column. The reader inherits this silence and, if the work has been done well, mistakes it for ease.
We have grown accustomed to publication as a continuous gesture, a stream that never quite arrives. The feed updates; the headline rotates; the byline blurs into a ticker. What we lose, in this perpetual deferral, is the dignity of the finished thing. A magazine, properly conceived, is an object of decisions; a website too rarely admits that anyone has decided anything at all.
Our quarrel is therefore not with the digital medium itself, which is generous and various, but with the velocity-first ethos that has annexed it. The argument of these pages is that ideas merit spatial generosity and that an essay, like a sonnet or a fugue, has a shape which the layout must honour. We do not believe that scrolling should resemble flight; we believe it should resemble the turning of a page.
Consider the column rule, that thin vertical mark between two passages of justified text. It performs no obvious function. It does not separate ideas; the ideas separate themselves. It does not aid legibility; the eye is competent without it. And yet remove it and the page collapses into porridge. The rule announces that an editor has been here, that this expanse of language has been governed.
So too with the drop capital, the running head, the colophon. These are not decorations. They are the visible marks of an organising intelligence. They tell the reader: someone has read this for you, and judged it worthy of these particular dimensions of paper, this particular angle of light, this particular weight of ink upon this particular fibre of stock.
To call such matters typographic is correct, but the matter is also moral. Layout is a form of attention, and attention is a form of respect. The pages that follow are an attempt to take the chatter of the day — the gabs, the talk, the loose-lipped commentary that is our common currency — and afford it the courtesies once reserved for verse.
Plate III. — A compositor's stone, photographed at the Imprimerie Nationale, 1953. Albumen print, retouched.
Annotation · III
A Note on the Plate
The compositor's stone was the moral centre of every print shop. Upon its planed surface the type was assembled, line by line, into a single locked form. To stand at the stone was to hold an entire argument in one's hands at once.
In the photograph, the lamp throws a low oblique light across the imposed forme. One can almost read the headline backward, in mirror-image. The cross-hatching is not in the original; it has been added, here, in homage to the engravers whose plates were once the only pictures the public ever saw.
We reproduce the image because the gestures it records — the deliberate hand, the measured leading, the locked chase — are the same gestures we wish to perform in pixels. The medium is changed; the discipline, we hope, is not.
Apparatus · IV
A Critical Edition
There is a sentence, attributed variously to Aldus Manutius and to a printer in seventeenth-century Leyden, that the white space of a page is more important than its black. We do not endorse the attribution; we endorse the sentence. Margins are not absence. They are the precondition of presence.
A reader requires room in which to think. The architecture of a critical edition is the architecture of company: the principal text in the centre, the editor's voice at the shoulder, the dissenting voices at the right hand. To read such a page is to participate in a conversation that has been in progress for centuries.
We have arranged this spread accordingly. To the left, the apparatus of glosses and dates; in the middle, the argument; to the right, the responses, the disagreements, the qualifications. The threads that run between them are drawn, not implied. We have made the conversation visible.
Colophon
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gabs.news
A quarterly review of letters, conversation, and idle speech, set in
Cormorant, Libre Baskerville, Crimson Pro, and Spectral, upon a ground
of laid paper. Composed in five spreads.
Editors: Mireille Caradec · Jonas Verlet · Tomasz Hofstadter
Compositor: the Press at the Sign of the Brass Paperweight
Issue Forty · Spring, MMXXVI
Printed, as it were, on screen · All rights reserved