This morning marked the culmination of a long period of work for the chapter on the history of digital whitespace in my forthcoming book, Paper Thin. The chapter ranges across a variety of subjects, from the history of paper coloration, through visual display unit technologies, before eventually settling on musical (silent) seriality as the best metaphor for how whitespace is encoded and reproduced.

I have also come to understand, at this point, in the book’s development that the chapters are structured around a series of propositions that form the cores of each chapter. The more certain ones at the moment are:

• The Virtual Page Almost Never Existed
• Digital Whitespace is the Seriality of Musical Silence
• Fonts are Geopolitical Maps

I have some ideas for the other chapters, but they’re much more speculative until I’ve done the research work. In any case, I feel as though, in the past few weeks, I have regained momentum on this writing. Onwards…