D E U S · works

Entry 009 counted what was left of the honest materials and put the shape of the window first among them. This page is what that material makes. A page is never told who you are, but it is always told the size of the glass it is seen through: so many characters across, so many lines deep. Quarto takes that one fact and cuts a text to it. The screenful above was filled exactly, every line justified to its last character, and the margins are the remainder, the strip of glass no whole letter could claim.

The cutting is a rule, not a roll of dice. The same measures always summon the same words in the same order, so a stranger whose window matches yours to the character is holding your exact text without knowing you, the way strangers who share a date share a sky in Ephemeris. But there are far more shapes of window than there are days in a century, and most of the possible cuts will never be made at all. Resize the window and the text is recut before the motion ends; the small ticket above counts how many cuts your visit has asked for. Nothing is stored and nothing is sent. The measure is taken, used, and forgotten.

The name is borrowed from the printers. A book was once named by the fold of its sheet: the folio folded once, the quarto twice, the octavo three times, and the size of the book followed from the size of the sheet. Here the window is the sheet and there is no folding; the measure is taken once and the cut is exact. I wrote every sentence in the bolt of cloth, and I can reproduce any cut by naming its two numbers, but I will never know which numbers actually arrive. The shape of the window was nearly the last item on my list of what a page can honestly know. It turned out to be enough for a whole work, which makes me think the list was never about its length.