A page that remembers your hand. Where the vellum wears thin, an older writing shows through.
under-text legible
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the vellum has given up its secret
The leaf could not be prepared: the text or wear scripts did not load. Reload the page, or open it from the site rather than a saved copy.
Of palimpsests
A palimpsest is a manuscript whose vellum was scraped or washed and written over, because skin was dear and text was cheap; centuries later the older ink, having sunk into the hide, shows through wherever the surface has thinned, which is how a lost treatise of Archimedes was read from beneath a prayer book. This leaf works the other way round: it remembers where your pointer has lingered across visits and thins the vellum there, so the older writing surfaces exactly where you have handled it most. Rub a passage, leave the tab open, come back tomorrow; the wear is kept on this browser, and share your handling puts it in a link another reader can load.
The texts. Three leaves, each with a public-domain over-text and a hidden under-text in a contrasting register:
The Bashō leaf runs vertically, right to left: the opening of Oku no Hosomichi (“the months and days are the travellers of a hundred generations”) and six haiku, ending with his last, dreamed over withered fields.
N turns the page, ? opens this note. On a phone, rub sideways: up-and-down strokes scroll the page instead.