A review of language, the image, and the mind — issued monthly, occasionally sooner.
The Feature
Before the photographic plate, the sky was an argument made in ink. Engravers worked from other people's nights, translating half-remembered magnitudes into dots of settled certainty — and in doing so invented a way of seeing that we have never entirely put down.
An essay on astronomy's draftsmen, the psychology of the constellation, and why the human eye insists on drawing lines between unrelated stars.
By Hanne Marchetti · 26 min read
Plate · Color Theory
Goethe insisted his wheel was not a measurement but a confession. He assigned each hue a temperament — yellow the serene, blue the cold, red the restless — and drew the whole thing as a diagram of human feeling. We have inherited the wheel and forgotten the confession.
Here the four cardinal humours are pinned where the octants meet, in the manner of the eighteenth-century moralists who believed a man's character could be read off the colors he could not abide. It is, of course, nonsense. It is also, of course, the only color theory anyone remembers.
An appendix to “Chromatic Arguments” · By Martin Ashe
The Cabinet
House illustrations for Letterhead: invented instruments, invented anatomies, and one wheel that has never once been wrong.
Tab. I.
Iconismus Mentis Humanae
The mind as a chambered observatory; fourteen rooms, one telescope, no exit.
Pl. I.
The Natural System of Colors
Twelve hand-tinted segments, shewing their mutual relations and affinities.
Pl. XVII.
The Attentioscope
An instrument contrived for the measurement of attention. Scale: steady to very inconstant.
The Standing Formats
Every issue runs on three shapes. Read the specimens, then send us the pitch.
Formats & submissions →I
An obsolete system, taken seriously, for one week of ordinary life.
Specimen: I Kept My Grocery List in a Memory Palace
II
A rigorous diagram of something with no business being diagrammed.
Specimen: A Phrenology of the Home Desk
III
Plain-talking psychology on one absurdly small domestic thing.
Specimen: Why the Last Stair Is Different
Applied Archaism
The classical art of memory, followed to the letter, for one week of ordinary shopping.
By the Editor · 11 min
Plate · Format II
Plate III. — The working surface mapped into its nine faculties, after the manner of the cranial atlases.
By the Editor · 6 min
Field Notes from the Interior
You have climbed these stairs ten thousand times. Your foot still gets the last one wrong.
By the Staff Psychologist · 8 min
Visual Arts
On nineteenth-century flower plates, the pleasure of description, and looking as a form of patience.
By Iris Neroli · 14 min
Psychology
Phrenology was wrong about everything except the appetite for maps of ourselves.
By Daniel Okonjo · 18 min
Literature
Woodcut sleepers, marginal annotations, and the sentences that only arrive at 4 a.m.
By Vera Lindqvist · 9 min
Essay
Every system for ordering color smuggles in a system for ordering people.
By Martin Ashe · 22 min
Collections
The architecture of concentration, from monastic carrels to the reading room ladder.
By Sofia Reyes · 11 min
One essay, one image, one stray idea. Sent Sunday mornings.
“The eye is not satisfied with seeing; it wants to be told what it saw.”
