Colophon

What this document is made of.

A colophon is the page at the back of a book that names the type, the paper and the press. This site claims to be a printed document, so it owes the reader the same page. Everything below is checkable against the stylesheet, which is the only one.

Type: Four families, all under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. Archivo and Archivo Narrow set the index — the narrow cut takes the headings, where a tabellarischer Lebenslauf wants compression rather than size. IBM Plex Mono holds every date, label and status, so the eye can find the fixed columns without a rule to guide it. EB Garamond sets the essays.; The Garamond is a subset built here rather than downloaded, because the usual builds discard the real small-capital glyphs, and the opening line of every essay is set in them. Faked small caps — capitals scaled down — sit too light against the lowercase next to them; the difference is small and it is the whole point.; Chinese falls back to the system stack and is scaled to 92%. Han glyphs fill their em square where Latin ones do not, so matched point sizes read mismatched; the correction is optical, not metrical.
Colour: One accent, sampled from the sky in the photograph on the front page: #4a73ab. At that value it reaches only 4.65:1 against the paper — fine for a heading, not for a ten-pixel label — so the text version is darkened to #375a88 for 6.75:1, and the raw sample survives only in large blocks and in the selection highlight. Dark mode lifts the same blue to #9dbbe0, 8.7:1.; Dark mode is warm paper, not a black screen: the ground is #1b1a17. A document that turns into a void at night was never really a document.
Structure: Two directions, deliberately unreconciled. The index is an institutional form — a German tabellarischer Lebenslauf, date rail on the left, content in a fixed column, every status in the same place. The essays are book typography: one serif column, a measure of about sixty-seven characters, margins instead of rules, notes set outside the measure where a printed page would put them.; Carried across both: a running head that pins to the top of the window and does what a Kolumnentitel does in a book — name the work on one side, the chapter on the other. On the essays it also counts the pages, because a book tells you where you are.
Images: The plate on the front page is a Bildtafel: keylined, captioned with a place and a date, cropped tighter on wide screens and looser on narrow ones so it stays a figure in a report rather than a hero image. It shows cumulus congestus over Baotou, Inner Mongolia, 31 July 2024.; Plates are numbered and gathered in the plate index, which is what the plate itself links to. There they are printed whole: the crop belongs to the front page, not to the photograph.
Privacy: No cookies, no analytics, no third-party requests of any kind. The fonts are served from this domain rather than a font CDN, which is not only a preference: a Munich court held that passing a visitor's IP address to Google by embedding fonts from its CDN is an unconsented transfer of personal data (LG München I, 20 January 2022, Az. 3 O 17493/20). The server keeps ordinary access logs.; None of that survives a link out. Because the claim above is easy to hear as a claim about the whole afternoon, every outbound link passes through a doorstep page that names the destination and says plainly where the promise stops. It sets no cookie to remember that you have seen it, which is the joke that makes the page necessary.
Technology: Static HTML and one stylesheet. No build step, no framework, no package manager, no JavaScript that anything depends on — the three small scripts mark the current section, count the pages, and send outbound links through the doorstep, and the document reads correctly without any of them. Served by Caddy on a Hetzner machine, where deployment is git pull.
Corrections: Things on this site have been wrong before and will be again. Where they are found out, they are recorded on the errata page rather than quietly edited away.
Licence: The code is MIT. The prose is CC BY 4.0 — quote it, translate it, put it in a reader, just say where it came from. The photographs are not licensed for reuse. Full text in LICENSE.
Fassung: This document has versions, and the old ones are kept. The first number changes when it stops being the same document; the second one covers everything else. 1.2 — 2026-08-30 · The doorstep on outbound links. 1.1 — 2026-08-30 · Printing, this colophon, errata, marginalia, page numbers. 1.0 — 2026-08-19 · The first complete state: plate, running head, two directions, self-hosted type.

Set in EB Garamond, Archivo and IBM Plex Mono. This version written in Baotou, Inner Mongolia.