Folio I · Incipit

Of a Room Lit by One Candle

At a certain hour the library forgets it is a library and remembers, instead, that it is a room — a small warm hollow held inside a much larger and colder building. The candle on the desk has burned for an unspecified length of time. There is no clock willing to commit. The pages are foxed at the edges, brown as steeped tea, and the ink, where the ink has remained, has pooled into the watermark like a tide finding its shore.

This is the room MMIDDL was written in. Or rather: this is the room MMIDDL writes itself in, again and again, each time you arrive. The words are stable; the rest is not. The grain of the paper, the position of the flame, the small drawings in the margin — these are recomputed for you, just now, at the moment you opened the door.

Read at whatever pace you please. The marginalia will wait.

Folio II · On Vellum

The Substrate Remembers

Vellum is patient. Paper is patient. The screen, in its way, is also patient — it merely pretends not to be, flickering with such enthusiasm that we mistake it for hurried. Strip the hurry away and the pixel is just another grain, the backlight just another candle, the cursor just another scribe’s hand resting at the next empty line.

MMIDDL is built on the assumption that the substrate matters. That a sentence set in Lora at eighteen pixels with a line-height of one-point-seven-five reads differently than the same sentence flung carelessly into the default sans-serif of a billion identical landing pages. We have set the table. The candle is lit. There is no rush.

“A book is a machine for thinking with — but only if the machine is built well enough to disappear.”

Each folio you scroll through is a leaf. Each leaf is the same dimensions as the others; only the texture of the page beneath the words varies, as it would in a hand-bound quarto where the gatherings came from different mills.

Folio III · Marginalia

In Praise of Footnotes

There is a particular pleasure in the marginal. The little drawings monks made in the borders of psalters — knights jousting against snails, rabbits riding hounds, hands with too many fingers reaching up out of foliated initials — are some of the truest documents we have of the medieval interior life. The text was duty. The margins were where the soul wandered.

On this site the marginalia are dots. Small, burnt-orange, easy to overlook. Hover one and it expands. What you find inside is not the next breaking feature; it is a footnote, an aside, a sliver of the same texture you came for. The dots are a contract: nothing here demands you. Engage as deeply or as shallowly as you wish.

This is the opposite of the modal. The modal interrupts. The marginal annotation waits in the corner of your eye, like a friend in a library who has noticed something but will not break your concentration to mention it.

Folio IV · The Algorithm

A Scriptorium of Numbers

Perlin noise is not noise. It is, properly, a smooth pseudorandom field — a way of generating values that vary continuously across space, the way the temperature in a room varies continuously across the room, the way the grain in a piece of leather varies continuously across the leather. Ken Perlin invented it in 1983 to give the cyborgs in Tron their textured skin. It has been used, since, for almost everything: clouds, terrain, marble, the way light moves on water.

We use it here, behind your scroll, to make the page feel like a page. There is a canvas drawing softly behind these words at quarter resolution, blurred up by the browser, recomputed once a second. You will not consciously see it. You will, perhaps, feel that the surface beneath this paragraph has weight, even though it is only light.

  • The grain shifts each time you arrive.
  • The flourishes between folios are drawn fresh.
  • The sigil at the colophon will never be exactly this sigil again.

Folio V · Candlelight

A Note on Warmth

We talk often about the ‘feel’ of a website as if feel were vague. It is not. Feel is a stack of measurable choices: the warmth of the white point, the cadence of the typography, the ratio of motion to stillness, whether the page is content to be looked at or anxious to perform.

MMIDDL skews warm by deliberate degrees. The paper is not white but ivory; the ivory is not pure but foxed; the type is not black but ink-well charcoal; the accents are not red but burnt sienna. There are no cold blues here. The only cool element is the passage of time, which the candle, by its flicker, refuses to acknowledge.

If a website can be hospitable, this is what hospitable looks like: a chair, a lamp, a page, and the unspoken assurance that you can stay.

Folio VI · Colophon

Explicit

Typeset in Playfair Display, Lora, Cormorant Garamond, and Space Grotesk.

Pressed upon foxed parchment of Aged Ivory and Foxed Parchment.

Inked in Burnt Sienna & Candlelight Gold.

Printed at the sign of the candle, in the year MMXXVI.

No. —

Here ends the folio. Begin again, if you wish — the grain will be different.