A Book Is Not a Brochure: Why Poetry Needs Its Own Typesetter

For decades, writers have been asked to finish the difficult part in one program and then watch their work become generic material in another. The manuscript arrives at the layout desk; the layout software sees frames, styles, margins and pages. It does not see a stanza crossing the wrong boundary, a line ending that carries the weight of a poem, or a repeated sound that should remain audible on the page.

That blindness is not a moral failure. InDesign was built to solve an enormous range of visual problems. The problem is that a book of poems is usually treated as a small, awkward brochure inside that range.

Fabylon Bookmaker starts from the opposite assumption: the software should first learn what kind of writing it is setting. It scans metre in Dutch, English, German, French and Spanish; maps rhyme, alliteration and assonance; keeps stanza structures intact; and gives the author typographic warnings without pretending that a warning outranks a poetic decision.

Underneath that literary layer is a real compositor's workshop. Paragraphs are broken as wholes, not line by line. Hanging punctuation, optical margins, ligatures and rivers in justified prose are handled by instruments whose results remain visible and overruleable. A finished project can produce a print PDF, an EPUB, an editable .fab and a KDP-ready Word file from the same typeset pass, so the editions do not quietly diverge.

The most radical feature may be the least technical one: Bookmaker is free. The deterministic tools run locally, and the manuscript does not leave the machine unless its author explicitly sends something. Windows opens first at the end of August 2026; macOS and Linux follow.

This is not an argument that every poet must become a professional book designer. It is an argument that the author should be allowed to see the workshop, keep the source, and decide where help is actually useful.

See how Fabylon Bookmaker reads and sets a manuscript

 

A Tarot Deck for the Writer's World

Tarot has always been a machine for reading images, but writers already live inside another symbolic system: aspiration, thought, the desk, and the deadline. Those four pressures became the suits of Fabylon Tarot.

The deck is called The Major Canon & Courting Poets. Its major arcana carry writers rather than generic archetypes: Sappho appears as the Empress, Virginia Woolf inhabits the Unfinished Universe, Franz Kafka becomes the Calling, and the Magus arrives in three literary guises. The courts are writers too, while the numbered cards turn familiar studio experiences—revision, waiting, ambition, burnout, the stubborn return to the page—into images that can be read.

This is not an attempt to make tarot respectable by putting literature on top of it. It is closer to the reverse: letting tarot expose that a writer's life already contains chance, recurrence, ritual and interpretation. A spread does not dictate a future. It creates a temporary arrangement in which a question can become visible from a different angle.

All eighty cards can now be explored on one table, including the complete Major Canon and the suits Aspirations, Thoughts, Desks and Deadlines. The deck arrives in October 2026 and is not yet on sale.

Explore all eighty cards of Fabylon Tarot