Notes on the making

Typefaces

The body and display type is set in Cormorant Garamond, a contemporary revival of Claude Garamond's classical sixteenth-century cuts. It is used throughout — for the cover stamp, the chapter titles, the body, and the small tracked uppercase meta. There is no second face. A book bound in dark cloth and printed in metal type does not need one.

Palette

The page is set against a deep navy — the colour of a midnight clothbound endpaper — and printed in warm cream. The accent is a single antique gold, used as a foil tone on navy and as a softer ink tone on cream. There is no light mode. A book bound in dark cloth does not have a light mode.

Lineage

The intellectual debts run, in no particular order, to: Plutarch's Lives, for the conviction that arguments are best made through biography; to Seneca's Letters, for the conversational gravity that long-form prose can still carry; to the Indic dharmic tradition, for the older account of duty and self-knowledge; and to Robert Greene, for the demonstration that the patient study of historical figures is still useful work.

Closer to home, the prose owes much to the late European essayists — Berger, Steiner, Sebald — who knew that a sentence is a place a reader is asked to stand for a moment, and should be built accordingly.

Construction

The site is built simply: file-based routing, no analytics, no third-party trackers, no chat widgets. Email subscriptions are stored in a small private database I own and can export at any time. The list will never be sold or shared.

Credits

Written, designed, and maintained by Karthik K Raman.