Inscription Issue 1: Beginnings

<p>Where to begin? How to begin? With a welcome.</p> <p>Welcome! You’re reading <em>Inscription</em>, and we’re delighted about that. Perhaps this copy has just arrived in the post and you are opening these pages for the first time. Perhaps you are browsing this snippet online, unable to see the whole text, weighing up the odds. Perhaps someone is reading this to you. Perhaps you’re in a library looking for a particular article and this volume has just been carried up by a librarian from the deep stacks with an old reader’s slip tucked between pages 12 and 13. Or perhaps it is decades from the moment now when I am writing: welcome 2147, or 2238, and welcome future-you, with all your unforeseen ways, turning the pages of a long-ago journal that, as I write, has three months until publication. Wherever or whenever you are: welcome, and thank you for reading the first edition of <em>Inscription.</em></p> <p>A welcome, and then a statement of purpose. <em>Inscription</em>: <em>the act of inscribing; the action of writing upon or in something, especially in a durable or conspicuous way.</em> Are we durable and conspicuous? Time will tell, but we are certainly invested in thinking about making marks upon or in surfaces or substrates. Inky revisions in a novelist’s notebook. A chisel cutting into stone. Hurried pencil scrawls across scraps of paper. Pieces of lead type pressing ink on to paper. Spiralling digital text viewed on a phone. A goose quill scratching parchment. The repelling force of oil and water playing out across a lithography stone. Grooves cut into polyvinyl chloride (or PVC, or vinyl). <em>Inscription</em> will explore material texts and the processes of mark-making in all these varieties and specificities…</p>