On this library

This is a library of the essays of Paul Graham, set with the patience a book deserves. The writing is not new. What is new is the room it is given to breathe: a wide margin, a cream page, a single column of type in a serif made for reading at length.

Most of these essays were written to be read once, in a browser tab, on the way to something else. That is a strange fate for prose this considered. The arguments compound. A line you skimmed in 2004 turns out, ten years later, to have been the whole point. They are essays that reward slowness, and slowness is what the open web most aggressively refuses to give them.

So this library exists for a small and specific reason: to make the essays available in a setting that takes them seriously. No sidebars. No suggested reading. Just the text, the way a good edition of a book would set it, with ornaments where there should be ornaments, and silence where there should be silence.

Paul Graham wrote everything here. This site only typesets it. The canonical home of these essays (the place where new ones appear, and where any disagreement with the text should be taken up) remains his own.