Oakfield directory
Colophon & illustration sources
Historical illustrations come from the archival collections preserved with the Oakfield brand materials. The Studio screenshots and the personal ANSI-art essay are supplied by David Kirby.
Mechanisms, 1881
Boys’s integrating machine, Thomas’s improved steam wheel, the elevation and plan of a dry-air refrigerating machine, and Bell’s modified microphone appear in Scientific American Supplement, No. 288, 9 July 1881. The microphone illustrates the Gazette’s HOMOPHONI essay as an acoustic research instrument; it is not a tape recorder.
Read the source edition at Project Gutenberg.
Printing ornaments, 1830
These cuts come from Specimen of Printing Types and Ornaments, J. Howe & Co., Philadelphia. Scan numbers refer to the Library of Congress sequence.
- Teaching room with globe, No. 439 — scan 270.
- Globe, shipping & trade, No. 274 — scan 232.
- Floral divider, No. 162 — scan 204.
- Rosette divider, No. 325, and geometric frame, No. 328 — scan 246.
The prepared illustrations retain their source linework and proportions. Historical equipment is identified by its original subject; it does not represent an Oakfield product or project.
Specimen cuts, circa 1892
Additional illustrations and ornaments come from Specimens of printing types: ornaments, borders, corners, rules, emblems, initials, &c., MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan Co., Philadelphia. The University of California Libraries copy is preserved at the Internet Archive. The attributed publication date is [1892]; its preface is dated December 1891.
The references below use the original PDF sequence and the book’s printed page numbers:
- The masthead’s leaf border: PDF 344, printed page 416.
- The engraved “Sections” sign beside the homepage’s practice heading: PDF 345, printed page 417.
- The diamond-finial rule at the end of company and directory pages: PDF 347, printed page 419, No. 30.
- The leaf-and-diamond rule beneath page headings: PDF 353, printed page 425, No. 15.
- The hand with a pen in the homepage’s and practice pages’ correspondence sections, and the hand with a hammer beside the homepage’s Works practice: PDFs 405 and 406, printed pages 503 and 504.
- The beehive beside the homepage’s Software practice: PDF 413, printed page 511, No. 2302.
- The piano beside the homepage’s Press practice and on Press: PDF 419, printed page 517, No. 3936.
- The right-pointing index hand beside the practice pages’ introductory links: PDF 422, printed page 520.
- “At Home” above the homepage introduction and “Reception” on Contact: PDF 435, printed page 533, Nos. 3806 and 3803.
- “The End” in the shared footer: PDF 438, printed page 536, No. 3280.
- Gazette article illustrations: the hand with drafting tools, PDF 405, printed page 503, No. 4107; the hand pressing buttons, PDF 406, printed page 504, No. 4110; the owl, PDF 413, printed page 511, No. 2120; the “Hardware and Cutlery” anvil, PDF 418, printed page 516, No. 3095; and the steam-and-sail ship, PDF 426, printed page 524, No. 3981. These historical cuts also accompany the embedded articles on practice pages.
The transparent cuts preserve the scanned ink and original proportions. They are displayed whole, with no mirrored counterparts or repeated border tiles. The MacKellar illustration register records the source, dimensions, preparation, and hashes for all seventeen selected cuts, including decorative images with empty alternative text.
The homepage also pairs the Mathematics practice with Boys’s integrating machine, Intelligence with the globe and trade illustration, and the Conservatory with the teaching room. The floral divider introduces the homepage’s practices and follows each practice page’s introduction. A rosette closes the homepage’s and practice pages’ correspondence sections. These decorative illustrations are credited in the source editions above.
Archival illustrations displayed on the site use lossless WebP copies that preserve the originals’ pixels, dimensions, and transparency. The original PNGs and source records remain available; the compression register records the encoding command, file sizes, and hashes of both versions.
Studio screenshots
The Studio screenshots were supplied by David Kirby. Studio’s main figure shows a Bessel-beam experiment, while the homepage feature and Mathematics’ Studio section show an Airy-beam experiment. A second full figure shows a Fourier-spectrum view of a flat-torus mode.
The original images retain their full framing and proportions. Responsive WebP copies and full-size images are generated at build time. Six component close-ups use proportional CSS viewports over these screenshots, showing the Lua editor, field display, chaos-map controls, integrator, field statistics, and operator performance. Each clipped view links to its complete screenshot. These are views of Oakfield Studio; the historical engravings elsewhere on the site remain archival illustrations.
ANSI artwork, 1990s
“My life as a 13-year-old on IRC in 1993” includes Azreal’s artwork for David’s dial-up BBS kerslam!, supplied in David Kirby’s About.pdf. It accompanies the Gazette article and its About-page embed, with its original caption and credit.
The JPEG image was extracted from the PDF without resizing, cropping, or recompression. The ANSI illustration register records its native dimensions, credit, original image link, and source and image hashes.
Type & page
DejaVu Serif is the reading face; DejaVu Sans supplies labels and navigation; DejaVu Sans Mono is used for technical text. The page uses Paper, Ink, and Archive green from the house palette.
The fonts are served as WOFF2 copies with their full glyph repertoire, proportions, spacing, and hinting preserved. The original TTF files and license remain available; the font compression register records the encoder, file sizes, and hashes.
