A reading-record language
Glossa keeps what you read in a single ruled column. The margin remembers the date, the gloss holds the second thought, and the ink-blot marks the day's temperature.
Open a columnThe method
A feed forgets. A folder hides. A commonplace book keeps — and a kept page is a surface you can read down, in the order you met each thing.
Glossa makes that order the structure of the interface. Every entry lands in a single justified column, newest at the foot, and the rail in the margin hangs a dated gloss-tick beside it. The rail is the navigation; the column is the work.
Emphasis is something you can feel. Two markers — violet and gilt — pass over the words and overshoot them slightly, the way a real highlighter does. A single oxblood blot is reserved for the line you mean to argue with. Nothing floods; ink is precious.
Three kinds of keeping
Append-only, dated, linear. The spine of the practice — the order you actually met the work.
The second thought, kept beside the line on a thin guide. Disagreements live here, in their own hand.
Passages pulled forward for the essay, marked by the heat of the reading — violet to keep, oxblood to dispute.
The column, in use
This is the real component — the same ruled rail, the same overshooting markers, the same gloss on its guide line that you keep all day.
The first chapter argues the house shelters daydreaming. What stays with me is the distinction between the verticality of the house — the rationality of the roof against the irrationality of the cellar — and how memory files itself by room.
I mark the passages I will argue with in gilt, and the one line I disagree with in oxblood, so a glance at the rail tells me the temperature of a day's reading.
| Folio | Passage pulled forward | Marked |
|---|---|---|
| 014 r | "The house shelters daydreaming." | keep |
| 021 v | "The cellar is the dark entity of the house." | cite |
| 047 v | "Memory does not record concrete duration." | argue |
Begin a book
One ruled page, one ink, and the patience to return to it. The rest accrues on its own.
Open the first leaf