Principles
Written in Blackletter. Each paraph marks one rule.
These are the rules the library is built to. They come from what illumination did for the readers of manuscripts, and from writers on books whose names are at the foot of the page.
The text comes first. It is laid out and shown before any ornament is drawn, and a page without illum is complete.
Ornament marks the structure the author wrote: an opening, a new paragraph, a quotation, a break. illum does not guess which sentences matter.
Rank can be seen. The opening of a text gets the large initial and a paragraph gets a paraph, so a reader can tell the parts of a page apart at a glance, as readers of books without page numbers once did.
The same text always gets the same ornament. Hugh of St Victor, about 1130, told students to remember a passage by where it stood on the page and the colour of its letters. A page that redraws itself at random gives a reader nothing to remember it by.
Nothing covers a word or lowers its contrast. Frames go round the text; marks sit in the margins and in the gaps the text leaves.
Every irregularity has a cause in the making: a pen running dry, a stencil laid off the line, a compass closing a little past its start. Ruskin found in Gothic carving “the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone”; illum adds no noise that has no cause.
Each style is taken from objects we could study at full size, and they are credited. We take how the work was made and leave its pictures where they are. Owen Jones put it this way in 1856: “The principles discoverable in the works of the past belong to us; not so the results.”
The reader’s device pays for the ornament, so illum spends little. It sends nothing over the network, and nothing moves unless the reader asks to watch it written. The writing plays once and stops.