A companion volume
The Field Guide.
A cloth-bound book, dark linen with brass foil. It arrives before the season begins and stays with you long after the software is quiet. Read it slowly, in one room, with a pencil.
The Guide is not a manual for the app. The app is a manual for the Guide. On days when the screen is turned away, the book keeps working.
THE OBSERVATORY
The Field Guide
Being a companion to ninety days of quiet watching.
VOL. I · FIRST EDITION
LINEN COVER · 5.5 × 8.25 IN · 312 PAGES
Contents
Five sections, one long back.
The first four sections are set in Cormorant and IBM Plex. The fifth section is blank on purpose. The Guide expects your handwriting.
- I
On stance
How to sit before you look. What to do with the first minute of a dispatch.
- II
The five instruments
Plate work for each Chart: how they were drawn, what they refuse to say.
- III
The ontology
The twenty themes the Charts share. How convergence is heard, not counted.
- IV
The dispatch
The grammar of the daily letter. Sentence case. No jargon. No advice.
- V
Marginalia
Room to write. Two hundred blank pages, ruled and unruled, at the back.
An excerpt
The mistake is to read a chart the way one reads a weather report. A chart is not weather. It is the shape of the window through which the weather is seen. The window does not decide the weather. It only decides which weather you notice.
The Guide is included with the season.
There is no separate purchase. If your record is accepted for the next watch, the book will be shipped before Day One.