1. Always assume that the reader is capable.¹

Dexter Sinister are a publishing concern. Dexter Sinister (Stuart Bailey and David Reinfurt) are not artists, authors, critics, designers, editors, impresarios, journalists, philosophers, printers, publishers or snake-oil salesmen — unless they are all of the above at once: a publishing concern. That is, they are focused on publishing, as in the craft and manufacture and management of published pages, from writing to typeface to design to printing to publication to release to distribution to library deposit to mood to retrieval to use to archiving. Dexter Sinister make you note details. Their website is plain and text-heavy, with seemingly endless diversionary links taking you to other pages with more links. The now retired journal Dot Dot Dot entailed words aplenty, often words republished in slightly varied form. The advantage to being a publishing concern that works at every level of the process is that specifics are emphasised: how one issue has been designed; how one text has been generated, edited and distributed; how this one text has been edited and distributed the second time; how this one text slightly differs from its last publishing.

Here the exuberance for publishing and passion for distribution, unhampered by the logic and the strategy of business acumen, tumble over each other in the work. Keeping the path to publishing, that oft-unheard voice of editing and attention to typographic detail makes itself apparent. Dot Dot Dot. Need it pronounced? Ellipsis? Something excised. In their designs, italics and all-capitals are often used to highlight words and enact a point — that during writing a change is recognised, a shift in