Colophon

A colophon is classically set at the close of a book — a small accounting of the type, the paper, and the hands that made it. Here, it's an opportunity to speak a bit to how the thing in front of you was put together.

I ~ Type

The headings, and the small-capped opening of each page, are set in Playfair Display; the body beneath them leans on Cormorant Garamond, both chosen for their old-style proportions without any pretense of being a genuine metal face. The page itself sits on a deep burgundy ground, figured with a damask pattern (more on that in section V), the better to suggest the wall of a library at lamplight; the text is set in cream, the way a good ledger might be lettered on dark paper, and the links are picked out in a pale gold — the color, I like to think, of gilt on a well-used spine. At the corners of the text column, and along the rule above the navigation, a few small lozenge-shaped marks stand in for a printer's ornament: a tiny, mostly invisible reminder that a hand set the page down, however many keystrokes that hand actually required.

II ~ The Photographs

The little piles of photographs scattered through the photography pages are meant to resemble prints left loose on a desk — gathered, not filed — and they are built to be handled accordingly. Pick one up, with a mouse or a fingertip, and the pile fans out a little further, each frame settling at its own slight, imperfect angle, so that a visitor curious enough to dig can always find whatever's hiding underneath.

III ~ The Sensibility

The prose throughout this site leans, deliberately, on a kind of Neo-Victorian sensibility: long, accumulating sentences; a fondness for the parenthetical aside; and a considerable enthusiasm for the comma, deployed rather more often than strict economy would allow. None of this is offered as any serious claim to historical accuracy — it's an affectionate wink at an older, more ornamental mode of address, the sort that takes its time arriving at the point because arriving quickly was never really the point.

IV ~ Technical

The site itself is plain underneath the prose: static HTML and CSS, a little JavaScript to move the photographs around and to run the slideshow, and nothing resembling a framework or a build step. It is stored and versioned in a GitHub repository, and carries no analytics, no trackers, and no third-party scripts of any kind. Much of the writing and rebuilding here was done with Claude Code and Cowork, working from the actual corpus of manuals, mailings, and other communications the Social Club sent its members across its most active decade.

V ~ The Damask

The wallpaper behind every page here is traced from a real historical textile, and the credit for it belongs where credit is due: to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This site's burgundy pattern follows the Crimson Silk Damask (Spanish or Italian, about 1600; accession number 09.50.2759, Rogers Fund, 1909), and the pale cream pattern on its sister site, the Social Club, follows the Green Silk Damask (Italian, Venice or Genoa, second half of the seventeenth century; accession number 09.50.1348, Rogers Fund, 1909). Both are in the public domain, and each was photographed, flattened to two tones, and made to repeat without a seam.

It is hard to say enough about what the Met has done in making its collection openly available. Anyone, anywhere, may search the collection for damask and be rewarded with centuries of silk, wool, and linen, beautifully photographed, carefully described, and offered freely for any use at all, with no permission asked and no fee charged. That an artist, a student, or a host with a taste for Victorian wallpaper can sit down on an ordinary evening and borrow from one of the greatest museums in the world is a small, daily marvel, and an enormous and generous gift to the rest of us. With profound thanks, and an open invitation to go and lose an afternoon in it.