What on earth is this?

No, your monitor isn't broken. This blog, like the pages it accompanies, is done entirely in black and white (or, more properly, greyscale with maybe a little sepia sneaking in), except for parts of it over which I have no control, eg. the Google+ button. So it shall remain.

This is a sideblog, where I talk about discussions I've been in (mainly in blogs hosted on Blogger) that have something to do with something I've talked about on my main blog, which is built around a sort of idealized coffeehouse experience and will be home to most of my book reviews. The books reviewed will either be fairly old (published before the end of World War Two) or scholarly in nature, almost always, so if you're looking for a good recommendation of a best seller to pick up, you're in the wrong place.