Colophon

The source text

Every work is transcribed from The Works of Thomas Paine, Conway Edition — four volumes edited by Clinton P. Farrell, published in New York 1900–1902. It's the edition Paine's family authorised; every later reprint descends from it.

I worked from the Project Gutenberg e-text of the Conway volumes — I did not scan anything myself. Project Gutenberg's text is the source of record for this site's transcription.

Accuracy is still being verified. I'm working through the corpus to confirm each work against the printed Conway text. 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 period forms (shew, connexion, to-day).
• Punctuation. Left alone, em-dashes, semicolons, and the long sentences he used on the platform.
• Capitalisation. Left alone, including the Bible, the State, Heaven.
• Italics. Reproduced, mostly in titles and emphasized phrases.
• Footnotes. Inlined as ordinary paragraphs at the end of the section they belong to, marked with a leading asterisk.
• Page numbers. Removed, since 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.

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/.

“Books are the noblest of all blessings of the earth.”