⁂ — Back Matter

THE
COLOPHON

Every book from a press that respects itself ends with a colophon: a note on how the thing was made — the typeface, the paper, the shop, the hands. This is ours. It answers, from the site's own records, a question the editor asked at three in the morning: what percentage of this is me, and what percentage is the machine?

…the pattern I stitch into the piece entrusted to me…
that is my work.

— Agnes Thorn, The Piece Entrusted to Me, from the Archive

The instrument of record below is git blame, and it should not be trusted unsupervised. Blame is a proximate-cause instrument: it names the last hand on each line, not the origin of the line. By blame's logic the pen writes the novel, and the printing press is co-author of every book it has ever touched.

Nothing here is maintained by hand. The figures are recomputed from the repository each time the ledger is drawn, by the same sort of machinery they describe. The recursion is the point.

a census of 910 commits · 260 files · 221,972 attributed lines · the record as it stood on Aug 22, 2026

910 commits on record May 31, 2026 — Aug 22, 2026
625 authored by the machine 69% of the record
285 under the editor’s name 224 of them are the merge button
61 typed by hand commits owing nothing to a pull request
The type was set by
  • Claude Fable 5×124
  • Claude Opus 4.8×76
  • Claude Opus 5×70
  • Claude Sonnet 4.6×13
  • Claude×2
  • Vercel×1

as named in the commit record’s Co-Authored-By trailers — the way a colophon names a typeface.

The ledger of lines
the machine · 93% · 207,123 lines the editor · 7% · 14,849 lines

Blame is a proximate-cause instrument: it credits the last hand on each line, wherever the line came from. So the record is audited for the squash-merge — the ceremony that reassigns a whole machine-written branch to whoever pressed the button. Not one commit in the record has its shape — nothing to return, and the editor’s hand stands where blame put it, at 7% of the site.

6,292 lines that write themselves the Archive, the sitemaps, the changelog, the feed
69 days at the works of 84 on the visible record
71 commits on the peak day Aug 20, 2026
393 commits on the night shift 43% of the record, 22:00–06:00
The hours the works were running

each bar one hour of the clock; the violet hours are the night shift. There is a measurable 75-commit column at three in the morning.

93% of the typing was the machine’s.

100% of the deciding was the editor’s.

So the honest census, audited and unflattering: by keystrokes, the site is overwhelmingly the machine’s — the editor’s own hand is a sliver of the whole. And yet nothing in this repository was generated ex nihilo. Six departments, a college, a press, an archive that writes itself: each exists because it was specified into being, read, rejected, revised, and merged by one person, largely in the hours when nobody was making them do it. The prompts are the manuscript; the commits are typesetting.

The models are named in the roll above the way a colophon names a typeface — with gratitude, and without co-authorship. Nobody credits the press as author, even though, strictly speaking, it touched every page. The typing was delegated. The deciding — the direction, the taste, the countless hours, the night shift — was not, and cannot be. Meaning is produced. Someone must run the works.

The Changelog → — the same history told as a running record: every change a star, timestamped and described.

The Subscribers’ List

Before there were publishers' advances there were subscribers: readers who paid for a book before it existed, because they wanted it to exist, and whose names the printer set into the back matter as part of the record of manufacture. This press keeps the custom. The patrons who sustain the machinery are named here — at the editor's discretion, with their consent, permanent as the repository.

The list is held open. The first names are still being set.

Support the machinery → — the ways to sustain the works, and to be set into the list.