Colophon

The source text

Every work is transcribed from The Writings of Thomas Paine -- four volumes edited by Moncure Daniel Conway, published in New York by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894-96. It is the standard public-domain scholarly edition; the natural complement to Conway’s 1892 two-volume Life of Thomas Paine; and the most reliable source for everything Paine wrote that survives.

I work from the Internet Archive scans of the four Conway volumes (item IDs writingsthomasp01-04painuoft) and from the Project Gutenberg plain-text releases of the major works (Common Sense, the Crisis, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason, Agrarian Justice). Where those sources disagree on a debatable reading I default to Conway and note the variant in the work’s front matter.

Accuracy is still being verified. I’m working through the corpus to confirm each work against the printed Conway page. Corrections are recorded in each work’s revision history at /works/<slug>/history/ and in the public Git repository. The errata page describes the policy.

What I changed and didn’t change

• Spelling. Left as printed, including the eighteenth-century forms Paine used (shew, publick, connexion, to-day, Britain's long s). Where Conway silently modernized a 1776 form to an 1894 form I left Conway’s reading.
• Punctuation. Left alone -- the long Augustan sentences, the colon-semicolon traffic, the emphatic capital initials.
• Capitalisation. Left alone, including the Constitution, the State, Heaven, Providence, and the proper nouns Paine routinely italicized.
• Italics. Reproduced, mostly in titles and emphasized phrases. Paine used italics generously.
• Footnotes. Conway’s editorial footnotes are kept and marked as such; Paine’s own footnotes are inlined at the end of the section they belong to, marked with a leading asterisk.
• Page numbers. Per-page anchors are emitted as zero-width spans so deep links to /works/common-sense/#page-vol1-58 work whenever Conway’s pagination is recoverable. Visible page numbers are removed; the digital text reflows.
• OCR slips. Corrected silently when the right reading was obvious. When the reading was a real variant, I noted it in the work’s front matter.

Why Conway, not Foner

Philip S. Foner’s Complete Writings (Citadel, 1945, two volumes) is the standard modern scholarly edition and is still under copyright. Conway is a generation older, slightly less complete (Foner adds a handful of letters and the unpublished prose Conway didn’t have), and unambiguously public domain. For a free, fully reproducible online edition, Conway is the only available choice. Where a Foner-only piece is on this site, the source line says so.

Where my writing lives

I keep my commentary off the texts. Headnotes and longer essays go in the blog. The work index, concept index, and year-by-year chart are editorial framings; the texts they frame are Paine's, untouched.

Typography

EB Garamond for the body -- Octavio Pardo's open revival of the sixteenth-century type cut by Claude Garamont. Inter for the chrome -- Rasmus Andersson's open grotesque. Both served by Bunny Fonts.

Design

Monochrome ink on near-neutral paper, square corners, generous leading. The reader panel (the slider icon in the masthead) lets you change typeface, size, line height, line width, and theme. Your choice is remembered locally.

Accessibility

I aim for WCAG 2.2 AA. Every interactive surface reaches by keyboard, every focus ring is visible, contrast is checked. Animations honor prefers-reduced-motion.

Privacy

No tracking cookies. Two cookieless analytics services -- Umami Cloud (public dashboard at /analytics/) and Cloudflare Web Analytics. Both anonymise IPs and store no personal identifiers. No log of which works you open. Notes, highlights, and saved readings stay in your browser. Full statement at /privacy/.

Build

Eleventy, Nunjucks, vanilla CSS. Full pipeline at /tech-stack/. Source is open; every change is in the git history.

Editor

I prepared this edition; my studio, Pikes Peak Web Designs, keeps it running. Corrections welcome at /contact/.

“The mind, in discovering truth, acts in the same manner as it acts through the eye in discovering objects; when once any object has been seen, it is impossible to put the mind back to the same condition it was in before it saw it.”