How this edition is made

The two voices

Two families of type share this site, and the line between them is the closest thing the edition has to a law. IM Fell English sets the Gazette’s paper titles and recipient lines; IM Fell DW Pica carries Publius’s essay text. Everything modern—the companion notes, the guides, Reader mode—speaks in Libre Caslon Display and Libre Caslon Text. Fell speaks only when the historical document does.

A 1787 New York paper would most likely have been set in Caslon. The Fell types are seventeenth-century Oxford—a century earlier and an ocean away from Publius. But their worn, irregular letterforms carry the feel of hand-set metal better than anything cleaner I tried, and I chose the feeling over the footnote.

There is no long s in this edition—no Congreſs to decipher—because readability outranks period dress. What stayed: the ligatures the Fell fonts genuinely carry, and the œ in the heading every essay runs under, The Fœderalist.The Federalist. Reader mode sets both aside for modern spellings, and screen readers always hear the modern words.

The rival sheet

The eight Anti-Federalist essays run under a different masthead because they ran in a different paper: Thomas Greenleaf’s New-York Journal. Its nameplate here follows the surviving sheets—one mixed-case line, no ornaments—its paper runs a step lighter and cooler, as if bought from another mill, and its columns are set in IM Fell Great Primer, a different cut of the same Oxford types that serve Publius. The imprint under the dateline is Greenleaf’s own, down to the true small-caps cut of the Fell family. Even the accent colors trade places: where Publius’s sheets speak verdigris first, the Journal answers in oxblood.

Little of this is guesswork. Every essay page shows the actual Journal page that carried it, digitized by the Library of Congress, and the decisions above are cribbed from those scans. The one liberty is the same one the whole edition takes—Fell instead of Caslon—and it is taken evenly on both sides of the argument.

Set like a newspaper

The sheet is composed the way its models were. A masthead lockup crowns each page, its dateline set between fine double rules. The text runs in real newspaper columns—one on a phone, up to three on a wide screen, never more than each column can carry legibly—divided by hairline rules.

Each essay opens with a single drop cap, the only one it gets. There is no byline above the text, because the originals carried none; at the foot of the final column, Publius signs flush right, letterspaced, as in the first printings.

Justified, at last

Until July of 2026 these sheets were set ragged right—an edge no 1787 compositor would have tolerated. Hand-set newsprint was justified; the Gazette wasn’t, and it bothered me.

The columns are justified now, with Knuth–Plass line breaking—the algorithm Donald Knuth and Michael Plass published in 1981, and the one TeX has used ever since. It came by way of justif, Lyall Cooper’s library, which surfaced in a Show HN thread in mid-July; within the week it was running here. Where a browser justifies one line at a time and stretches whatever comes up short, justif considers the whole paragraph at once, so the spacing stays even and the rivers drain away.

The before-and-after, at the Gazette’s exact column measure, is in the field notes. Reader mode stays ragged left on purpose: for modern reading, even word spacing is kinder than a flush margin.

Reading at your size

Beside the Gazette-or-Reader toggle sits a five-step text-size control. It drives a single value, --reading-scale, which multiplies the essay and companion prose. The column measures scale with it, so enlarged text reflows into fewer, wider columns rather than cramped narrow ones. Mastheads, headings, and rules never scale. The choice is remembered in your browser and applied before the page first paints.

The wear

Every sheet is worn, and no two are worn alike. When the site is built, each paper’s number seeds a stable material fingerprint: deckled edges with small nicks, softened corners, a single lifted corner on roughly two sheets in three, and a warm tea-tan browning at the perimeter that ages the corners hardest. Each paper always looks like itself—revisit No. 10 in a year and its dog-ear will not have moved.

There are no stains or burns. The sheets are meant to look carefully preserved. Wear never touches the text, and it withdraws entirely in Reader mode, in print, and for readers who ask for high contrast or reduced transparency.

Rights & reuse

The eighty-five essays — and the eight Anti-Federalist essays beside them — are in the public domain, as they have been for more than two centuries; read, copy, and share them freely. The editorial notes and companion writing are © Federalist Reader and offered under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license—use or adapt them anywhere, with credit. The photographs of period printings in the print room appear by permission and are not covered by that license; the New-York Journal page images are public domain, from the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America collection.

What it’s all for

The words are the authors’ own, following the Project Gutenberg text that the Library of Congress’s full-text guide itself relies on. The notes stay short, and the whole edition is free—no accounts, no advertising. The story behind the project is on the About page.

Begin with Paper No. 1 →