Colophon

Of the work itself

This volume, styled in the Latin Liber Parvarum Molestiarum and in the common speech The Grimoire of Mild Inconveniences, is a living record of the small apocalypses of daily life. It concerns not the ending of the world — which is loud, and well documented elsewhere — but the endings that arrive quietly and often: the feed that does not conclude, the seventeen urgent quests, the tiny square that saith I Agree, and that which wears the helpful face.

Earlier ages illuminated their fears in gold leaf and lapis: demons, plagues, comets, the wrath of the heavens. We have kept their borders, their grotesques, and their goats, and merely corrected the subject matter. The demons now hold phones. The plague is push notifications. The comet is a parcel, and it is out for delivery.

New leaves are appended to the volume as fresh inconveniences are recorded, for the supply of them is, by all reputable prophecies, inexhaustible.

Of the manner of reading

The reader presents the grimoire open, in the manner of a lectern: the newest leaves lie at the right hand, and the reader turns backward through the volume toward the older, as one leafs through regret. An index is provided for those who prefer their inconveniences alphabetized by chronology. Each leaf may be enlarged, and none is ever cropped, for the marginalia are the point.

Those consulting the volume upon a small hand-held vessel receive one leaf at a time, and may turn it with the sweep of a thumb — an irony the scriptorium has elected not to examine too closely.

Of the craft

The volume is bound as a static website in the old-fashioned manner: leaves of HTML, a single sheet of styles wherein every pigment is a named token, and one modest scroll of script that turns the pages, remembers where thou stoodest, and — if expressly bidden, and only then — murmurs the sounds of a scriptorium conjured from mathematics alone, fetching nothing from distant lands. No frameworks were summoned. No fonts were shipped from foreign realms. The parchment is generated by the stylesheet itself, fibers, foxing, stains and all.

It keeps no accounts, sets no trackers, and demands agreement to nothing — which, given the subject matter of its fourth leaf, is not an accident but a penance.

Of errors

Any errors in this volume are the fault of the wandering fire, which leapt to another hearth before the proofreading was complete. The scriptorium shall return to them presently. Presently, as the third leaf records, is a country with no maps.