Sinkage

OOpen a printed book to the first page of any chapter and look at where the text begins. It doesnot begin at the top. The running head is gone; the page number, if it survives at all, hasmoved to the foot; and the block of type starts a third of the way down the page, below anumber, a title, and a stretch of nothing. Book designers call that drop sinkage, and it is the most consist-ently observed convention in the trade that almost nobody outside it can name.

It costs paper. A chapter opener with generous sinkage gives away a third of a page to white space, anda book with thirty chapters gives away ten pages. Publishers have been paying for that space since theincunabula, and they keep paying for it, because the alternative — a chapter that starts where the lastone stopped, at the top of the next page, under a running head — reads as a continuation rather than abeginning. The sinkage is what tells the reader that they may put the book down here, or pick it up here.It is a pause built out of paper.

Everything else on the opener follows from that pause. The chapter number is set small and displayed,often in small capitals, often centred, because it is a label and not a sentence. The title sits below it, larger,with more air around it than any heading in the running text will get. Then the initial: a letter set two orthree lines deep, so that the eye, having dropped through all that white, has something to land on. Thefirst line after the initial is sometimes set in small capitals too, a habit carried over from the manuscripttradition, so that the step from display to text is taken in two stages rather than one.

None of this is decoration. Each element is a decision about pacing, made once, applied to everychapter, and then invisible. A reader who has never noticed sinkage has still been governed by it onevery chapter of every book they have read.

The web has no chapters. It has a scroll, and a scroll has no first page: the top of the viewport iswherever the reader happens to be. There is nothing above the text to be cleared away, and so there isno convention for what clearing it away should look like. Most articles online begin at the top, under anavigation bar, with the title crowded against the first paragraph, because that is where the default putsthem.

So the opener has to be made by hand. On this page: a label, set small and centred and spaced out, thatsays only where you are; a title, centred, with air; a paragraph mark to stand in for the sinkage a screencannot afford; and an initial three lines deep to catch the eye on the way down. The lines that followwere broken before the page was sent, so the first paragraph arrives already set. That is the whole treat-ment — four decisions, taken once — and it is enough to make a page that starts, rather than a page thatmerely continues.