A Page, Read Rather Than Pinched

A page is a room entered through the left margin, and this one draws its own walls so the text sits inside an object rather than floating in a window.¹ The measure is the first and only real decision; once the line length is set to a comfortable span, the inner margins, the footnote size, and the frame all fall out of it without further argument.

fig. i

Zoom is withheld here on purpose, because zoom is a way of not reading — a hover that magnifies the plate would fire every time the eye crossed it on the way down the column.² The control still exists, bottom-right, but the page opens in the state that trusts the reader, and the lens only arms once the reader explicitly asks for it. Until then the specimen is simply an illustration, sized to the measure and left alone.