Colophon

Progoff is a private press with a single obsession: the inner life in an age of permanence. 8 records on file. Every one of them is written for two readers at once.

The two readers

A record is one source of truth served two ways. A person reads a styled page: a dossier, prose, marginalia. A machine reads the same record as clean MDX, JSON-LD, and a structured feed. The surveillance-dossier chrome a person reads as atmosphere is the metadata a machine reads as data. Toggle Agent view in the status bar on any record and you can see both at once. Nothing is scraped. Nothing is guessed. There is one file, and it answers to everyone honestly.

The Custodian

The house byline is The Custodian: an institution with a conscience, which can read everything and chooses to publish only what should be published. A custodian is not an owner. It holds a thing, keeps it honestly, and hands it on. That is the posture of this press toward the record it keeps, and toward the one it argues you should be allowed to keep about yourself.

The status ledger

A record's status is not decoration. It is a device, and the press enforces it. A sealed record is listed with its hash and its contents are withheld from the page and from every machine endpoint alike. The withholding is the publication.

Open: Published, contents available. The default state of a record.
Live: Actively developing or breaking. The red tier. The capture is still running.
Sealed: Listed in the ledger with a verifiable hash; contents deliberately withheld. The seal is the statement.
Retracted: Published, then pulled. Retained for provenance. The contents are no longer served.

Provenance

Every record carries a sha256 hash computed from its source file. Any alteration breaks the signature. The hash is printed in the dossier, returned on the x-content-hash header of the raw endpoint, and embedded in the JSON-LD. The version you are reading is the version of record, and you can prove it.

The agent surface

The whole press is addressable by machine. These endpoints are always on:

/manifest.json — structured metadata for the entire press
/llms.txt — the summary index, llms.txt convention
/llms-full.txt — every served record's body, inlined
/feed.json — JSON Feed 1.1, with a _progoff block
/feed.xml — Atom 1.0
/sitemap.xml · /concordance

The name

After Ira Progoff (1921–1998), the depth psychologist who built the Intensive Journal: a method for keeping a private record of a life as it is lived. This press extends his premise into an age he did not live to see, where the private record no longer stays private by default. The journal deserves a steward. So does the journaler.

How it is set

Built with Next.js and served as static pages. Set in Fraunces (display), Newsreader (reading), and IBM Plex Mono (the machine register). No tracking, no analytics, no client state beyond the clock, the theme, and the index. The palette is iron-gall chemistry: ink goes on pale and oxidizes to permanent black, which is the whole argument in a color.

--boneCold institutional paper. Never cozy cream.

--inkThe writing color.

--oxideFully oxidized iron-gall ink. The dark ground.

--sulfurThe poisoned signal. Highlighter, hazard, decay.

--rustThe alert tier. Live records and retractions only.

Write softly. The ink remembers.