hadley.

The name

hadley is named after Hadley Richardson.

Hardly anyone knows her now. That is part of the reason.

Paris, in the early twenties

Hadley Richardson was Ernest Hemingway’s first wife. They both lived on her small inheritance, and she believed in him before there was any reason to.

They met in Chicago in 1920. She came from St. Louis, eight years his senior, had just buried the mother she had nursed to the end, and had been told all her life that she was too delicate for the world. He was twenty-one, home from the war with the scars on his legs, and wanted one thing: to write. By the time she went home, he knew he would marry her.

They married in 1921, and a few months later they sailed for Paris. He wrote for a Toronto newspaper, and for himself in the cafés, and nobody knew his name. A few streets away, at 12 rue de l’Odéon, Sylvia Beach kept Shakespeare and Company, the bookshop where that whole world met.

In December 1922 she set out to join him in Switzerland, where he was reporting on a peace conference. She packed all his manuscripts, so that he could work on them there. At the Gare de Lyon the suitcase vanished, with nearly everything he had written, the carbon copies too. It was never found. Hemingway began again, and she stayed at his side.

In the winter of 1925 they took their small son to the mountains, to Schruns in Austria. He worked on his novel, they skied. At Christmas Hadley’s close friend Pauline Pfeiffer came to join them. The visit became an affair.

In 1926 Hadley found out. She set one condition: if the two stayed apart for a hundred days and still wanted each other, she would let him go. In October the novel that made him famous came out, dedicated to her and their son. In November she released him, before the hundred days were up. The royalties he left to her.

Thirty years later, near the end, he wrote down his memories of Paris. They hold the wish that he had died before he ever loved anyone but her.

Hadley, the woman behind the man. The project carries her name, and the first theme carries his: hems, for Hemingway’s. Two names, one story.

Found by chance

What are site generators named after, anyway? I wanted to know when hadley needed a name. The answer: often writers and their characters. Hugo, Zola, Jekyll, Gatsby. That suited me. The category was clear; the name was not.

Chance brought it, in a conversation: Hadley. But it was clear at once: this was it. Hugo, Zola, Jekyll, Gatsby, all men. And hadley’s front matter could be gendered already: autor*in: is a perfectly ordinary key. It was time a woman had a turn.

What is left out

Hemingway wrote by leaving things out. Short sentences, few words, and most of the structure below the surface, like an iceberg, which shows only an eighth of itself above the water.

That is hadley’s way too. The machinery you see stays small, and every part of it can be explained. A simple rule that can be explained beats a clever one that cannot.

A print shop

hadley’s parts take their names from the trade that made books in those years: the print shop, where an editor’s marks went to the compositor and came back as proofs. Each name is a tool of that shop, in the order the work went:

None of these names needs more than one explanation. That was the rule in choosing them: one line, from Hadley Richardson through the Paris of the twenties into its print shops, and nothing beside it.

hems and punch

hems is Hemingway, simply. In the Scandinavian languages it has a second meaning: a small sleeping loft under the roof, open to the room below, warm and small enough to take in at a glance. Reading hems only as Hemingway is all you need. Knowing the other meaning makes you smile.

punch is the steel punch where everything begins: every letter comes from one. The second theme is made for a personal site, for anyone who wants to begin with themselves.

Both bring a sample site, and each belongs to a woman: Odile Lemoine writes about type in Paris, Noa Varela takes photographs in Lisbon.

A long time in the workshop

hadley is older than its name. For more than ten years I came back to it again and again: thought it through, built it, threw parts away, started over. Lima, its format for front matter, is the oldest part. It goes public only now, because only now is it what I wanted it to be: small enough to understand as a whole, every part made for the others.

A hundred years later

In the autumn of 1926 a marriage came to an end, though not the love. In the autumn of 2026 hadley comes out, under her name.

A developer in Germany builds a static site generator and names it after the woman who was there. The print shop is a terminal now, the compositor a developer. But the names still sound like lead on paper.

And whoever types hadley into a terminal today, a hundred years later, writes her name.