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Reading

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  • The drawings appear finished instead of drawing themselves on.
  • Darker ink, firmer rules, and the foxing lifted off the paper.
  • More air between the lines and between paragraphs.
  • Scales the whole sheet — the lines, the gaps and the measure — from whatever size your browser is already set to.
  • The first four also set the reading face, because they have a real italic. The rest change the headings and leave Newsreader to read.
Drawers
Two cohabitating modes

Drawer

The founding papers

The charter documents: why this cabinet exists and what it is for. Three papers, one of them signed, none of them a reading of anything.

The three papers Link to this section

Each line below says what the paper is for and where it sits against the other two. What each one actually contains is glossed once, on the front of the cabinet, and is not restated here: one sentence written twice is one sentence free to drift, and this cabinet keeps a register of exactly that kind of failure.

What this cabinet is for
Read it to find out what this site has promised. It is an index of aims rather than an argument, and each aim names both the page already keeping it and the observation that would show we had quietly stopped. An aim you cannot fail is not an aim.
Nothing here was inevitable
Read it to find out why any of that is worth promising. It is the argument the aims rest on: normal is an arrangement, arrangements have authors, and a reading is where an arrangement gets contested.
Two Cohabitating Modes
Read it to find out why there are two of these sites and what each is for. It is the only one of the three about the shelf rather than about this cabinet, and the only one signed — see below.

Why these are papers and not sheets Link to this section

A sheet is a reading of something: a specimen, quoted exactly, with our reading beside it and both signed. A founding paper reads nothing. It states a position, which is why it carries no plate number, no accession stamp and no provenance line — a stamp is for an accessioned specimen, and none of these is one.

That is also why they are listed rather than carded. A card would file them with the readings, and the plate is a claim about what the cabinet holds. These are a claim about why it exists.

Signed and unsigned Link to this section

Two of the three carry no author, and that asymmetry is deliberate. The aims and the manifesto are the collaboration speaking — the manifesto is explicit that what it adapts was written by nine people. Two Cohabitating Modes carries Ryan Boren’s name, because the claim it makes about hedgehogs, spiky profiles and Disabled solidarity is his, made from his sources.

A founding paper is signed when it carries a first-person claim somebody made, and unsigned when it is the house position. Signing is a property of the paper and never of the group.

What would join them Link to this section

Anything that states this project’s stance rather than describing its workings. The test is the one the drawer is named for: charter documents, the things the rest of the cabinet presupposes. A page about how the site is built, what it has recorded, or what it knows about you belongs in the other drawer, however well written it is. Purpose above plumbing, and the line between them is the whole reason there are two drawers and not one.