TENETPRESSColophon

The name isa square.

SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS. Twenty-five letters that read the same in four directions. The earliest known examples were scratched into walls at Pompeii.
The word
TENET is the third person of teneo: he holds. Of the five words it is the only one that is its own palindrome, and the only one that appears twice — once across, once down, crossing at the central N. That crossing is the mark.
The object
Twenty-five letters held in five rows is also a literal description of set type: sorts locked in a chase. The mark is a picture of the medium.
A reading
In 1926 Felix Grosser proposed that the twenty-five letters can be rearranged into PATERNOSTER twice, set as a cross sharing the central N, leaving two A’s and two O’s — Alpha and Omega. It is a proposed reading and not a provenance: whether the square was Christian in origin is disputed, and no agreed translation of the five words exists. AREPO is attested nowhere else in Latin.
The tension
A press called he holds, beginning with a poem about the failure to hold.

The square is the armature of this site: its columns, its margins, and its silences are a division of five. The mark is the crossed word alone.

This site is set in Instrument Serif and Instrument Sans.

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