Colophon
On the typefaces, the ink, and the press.
The 221B Daily is set in Playfair Display for the masthead and section headlines, and EB Garamond for the body. Both are open-licensed digital revivals of nineteenth-century typefaces; the former a Didone in the Bodoni line, the latter Claude Garamont’s 1561 punches by way of Georg Mayr. Numerals run in Roman where the typesetter’s eye finds it natural.
The paper colour is #f4ecd8, an aged-cream notional
to The Strand Magazine before the foxing took. The ink is
#1a1a1a, a soft black that reads as letterpress at
screen distances. Editorial accents draw from a small palette:
a deep evergreen for confidence, oxblood for caution, sepia for
recent past tense.
The press is Cloudflare’s edge: a Worker compiled from Astro 6, with an SQLite-derived database (D1) for cases and verdicts, key-value storage (KV) for paywall counters, and object storage (R2) for narration assets. Cases are generated with Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.6 and verified by Claude Haiku 4.5. Audio is narrated by Microsoft Azure Neural TTS with the en-GB Ryan voice.
With thanks to the public-domain canon, to the legions of Sherlockian critics who keep its scholarship alive, and to every reader who returns each morning to play.