Colophon

This site is a folder of plain files: pages of HTML, one stylesheet, four font files, and drawings. I put it together by hand. Nothing is assembled when you ask for a page, and nothing runs in your browser. There isn’t a script anywhere on it.

What it doesn’t do

It sets no cookies. It has no visitor counter and no analytics. It has no forms, no comments, no sign-up, and no ads. It loads nothing from anybody else’s server; the fonts and the pictures all live here. I have no idea who reads it, or whether anyone does, and I like it that way.

Type

The text is Nimbus Roman, in regular, italic, and bold. The letters on the drawings and the line I type are Nimbus Mono. Both are free typefaces from the URW foundry. I left out the bold of the mono. On a typewriter, bold is hitting the key harder.

The type samples

The strips are drawings, not scans. I don’t own a scanner worth the name. I lay the real slip on the bench and reproduce what each letter did, how high, how tilted, how dark, one character at a time. They’re faithful to the fault and not to the fibers of the paper. The real slips are in a shoebox, dated in pencil.

The drawings

The plates are mine, and they’re simplified. They aren’t to scale and they aren’t any one make of machine. They show how a part works, not how to take one apart. The big drawing on the front page is a typewriter that doesn’t exist: a standard with forty-three type keys and forty-three typebars, drawn with its shell off so you can see the basket.

Colors

The green-gray is as close as I could get to the enamel on No. 12. The red is ribbon red. The brass is the tags on the shelf.

Following along

There’s an Atom feed, if you use a reader. New entries show up when a machine is done, which works out to about once a month.