R R I D D L
A Cabinet of Curiosities
R
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The Index

"In which we enumerate the contents of this peculiar volume, that the reader might navigate its mysteries with some semblance of order."

The Cover & Its Ornaments p. i
An Index of Curiosities p. ii
A Bestiary of Strange Specimens p. iii
Marginalia & Living Annotations p. iv
Colophon & Printer's Mark p. v
N.B. — The page numbers herein are purely aspirational.
cf. the beetle on p. iii, which disputes this ordering.
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A Bestiary

"Being a faithful catalogue of creatures observed in the margins, compiled by the Keeper of Overlooked Things."

Plate I Fungus marginalis The Common Margin Mushroom. Found sprouting between paragraphs, particularly in damp prose.
Plate II Scarabaeus bibliophagus The Page-Eating Beetle. Consumes footnotes with particular relish.
Plate III Tinea manuscripta The Manuscript Moth. Drawn irresistibly to illuminated capitals.
Plate IV Lumbricus textivorus The Bookworm Proper. Travels exclusively through serif typefaces.
? !
Plate V Codex ambulans The Walking Manuscript. A self-organizing document that rearranges its own contents when unobserved. Highly dangerous to bibliographers.
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† The author insists this passage was written by the bookworm, not by themselves.

Marginalia

"Being notes, observations, and unsolicited corrections deposited in the margins by parties unknown."

It is a truth universally acknowledged by librarians, if not by the general public, that books left unattended for sufficient duration will begin to develop a rich interior life of their own. The margins — those wide, inviting expanses of blank parchment that flank the body text — are the first territories to be colonized.

One begins to notice small things: a mushroom where yesterday there was only a footnote marker. A beetle traversing the gutter between pages 144 and 145, carrying what appears to be a semicolon on its back. Moths, of course, are drawn to the illuminated capitals, where they cluster around the gold leaf like scholars around a particularly contentious thesis.

What has pages but cannot be read,
has a spine but was never fed,
grows mushrooms where words once spread,
and worms through thoughts the living once said?

The answer, naturally, is this very document — which by the time you read these words will have already begun its slow transformation from text into ecosystem. The marginalia grows denser with each reading. The creatures multiply. The drop-caps grow more ornate, their serifs extending like roots into the substrate of the page.

We have attempted, on several occasions, to catalogue the full population of the margins. Each census is immediately obsoleted by the arrival of new specimens: a particularly bold bookworm that has taken up residence in the ligature of an "fi"; a colony of ink-blots that have organized themselves into what can only be described as a very small republic.

‡ Disputed by the moth faction, who claim primacy of annotation.
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Finis

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This volume was composed, set, and illuminated in the scriptorium of RRIDDL.com during the waning days of the age of screens, when books had not yet fully reclaimed their dominion over human attention.

The typefaces employed herein are Zilla Slab for headings (in the manner of letterpress broadsheets), Crimson Pro for body text (echoing the grace of Venetian old-style), and Fira Mono for marginalia and riddle-prompts (suggesting the annotations of a methodical but eccentric scholar).

The creatures depicted within were observed in their natural habitat and rendered faithfully, insofar as any depiction of a bibliophagous beetle can be considered faithful. The publisher accepts no responsibility for any bookworms, moths, or ambulatory manuscripts that may have escaped the margins during your reading.

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RRIDDL EST. MMXXVI

RRIDDL.com · A Cabinet of Curiosities · MMXXVI