Colophon

The website of Hudson Street Library is set in Literata, the typeface TypeTogether designed for long-form reading on screens. One variable font does every job on the site: its optical-size axis draws a high-contrast display cut at headline sizes and a sturdier, open cut for running text, so the largest title and the smallest excerpt are the same face at different ages.

The wordmark is the one exception. HUDSON STREET LIBRARY is set in Crimson Pro, Jacques Le Bailly's rework of Sebastian Kosch's Crimson Text. Crimson set every word of this site for years. It now keeps the door.

Dates, labels, and other small matter are set in Archivo Narrow, from the Argentine foundry Omnibus-Type. All three faces are free and open source.

The site runs on two inks. Text sits near-black on a warm paper white, and a single green does everything else: #034706, dark enough at eleven to one against white to read as ink rather than as decoration. It colours the mark, every link, and the seal stamped on the library's stationery, where it is matched to a spot ink rather than built from process colours. Screen and press use the same value.

The paler greens on the site are the same green thinned, not different colours. The ramp holds one hue across every step, which is a correction: the version before it wandered from yellow-green at the light end to a colder green at the dark end, and lost so much saturation in the middle that it read as grey.

The mark is a shelf of four spines, one leaning. It began as the favicon and now stands at the head of every page, stamped in the green. The whole drawing is four rectangles, the last one turned nine degrees. In print it is never set below seven millimetres, the size at which the leaning spine closes up and the shelf becomes a smudge.

The site is built with Eleventy and published as static pages. The catalog behind it is a single CSV file, one row per book, thirty-seven columns per row, 2,028 entries, each made by hand. There is no database, which seems right for a library that argues the shelf is the text.