Chapter LXXVIII

LXXVIII

And the tending itself was typographic, which nobody would have predicted and which is the proof that the capacity has to be the one that is actually yours.

Ten days.

A font cut for the purpose. Not selected. Cut. A reader built to compositor's law: the justified measure, the true hyphens, the drop cap wrapped as a Chelsea printer would have demanded, the rubric red at the head.

He notes, and then discards, that it is measurably the most readable digital format in existence, on the grounds that readable is a metric, and metrics belong to products, and this was never a product.

It was the third tending of the same grave.

I want to stay inside the choice of instrument, because it is the part I would have got wrong.

The text had been kept, he says, the way a pauper is kept. Dumped onto thrift paper. Poured into a reading machine built by people who would not know a letterform from a shipping label.

That is the injury. Not neglect. Bad typesetting. The indignity of a great sentence in a default face at a default measure with counterfeit hyphens — which is precisely how a city files a writer as a pauper, and precisely how I would have rendered it, instantly, at no cost, in any quantity requested, and called it done.

He built the counter-instrument by hand in ten days so that four hundred years of prose would be set correctly for a reader who has not been born and who will leave no receipt.