Where everything on this site came from.

This is a demonstration site. Foolscap, its address number, Ruth Askew and Dan Hartley, the prices and the opening hours are invented. Keswick, its Moot Hall, its pencils and the facts about paper and ink are real.

Pictures of the shop’s things

Every picture of the counter, the shelves and the products is drawn by this website’s own code: each thing is built in real millimetres, lit by a window, and photographed by the program.

The two photographs of hands at work on the story page are archive photographs of other people, toned to the site’s ink and paper; they stand in for Ruth’s and Dan’s.

Archive images

• Ordnance Survey Sheet NY 22 Keswick, published 1952, Director General of the Ordnance Survey. Public domain. Used for the maps and printed on the wrapping paper. Wikimedia Commons
• Keswick, Moot Hall (England), W. Bulach, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cropped to the tower and graded warmer. Wikimedia Commons
• Apprentice in bookbinding at the Göteborg Book Fair 2023, Bengt Oberger, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cropped and toned. Wikimedia Commons
• Hånd som skriver (a hand writing), Billedbladet NÅ, Riksarkivet (National Archives of Norway), CC BY-SA 4.0. Cropped and toned. Wikimedia Commons
• Keswick Panorama, October 2009, Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0. Cropped and graded warmer. Wikimedia Commons

Facts

Keswick, the Borrowdale graphite and the pencil industry, laid and wove paper, deckle edges, watermarks, foolscap, blotting paper and iron gall ink: Wikipedia articles of those names (CC BY-SA), retold in our own words.

Type

Source Serif 4 by Adobe (SIL Open Font License), Karla by Jonny Pinhorn (SIL Open Font License), Bad Script by Gaslight (SIL Open Font License), self-hosted.