About

The series

THRIVING after the FALL is a series of books about the life that comes after survival. Each book takes one good thing a household lives by and rebuilds it from the ground up, in one place, fully, until it is worth having again. The first book is about the table. FEASTING after the FALL follows a family, a street and a village from the ore in the rubble to the candle on the cloth, with Berlin and the sand of Brandenburg as the worked example.

The books share one library, one index, one calendar and one fact-check log, so that what one book learns the next can stand on. The shelf on the front page shows the volumes in preparation as empty spines.

Who makes them

Directed and produced by Thomas Schindler. Written by an LLM with the support of humanity.

The voice follows the tradition of the cultural history: open on the body, widen into the deep history of the craft, and turn at the end to the present, handing the reader the tool. Every chapter ends at the bench, with weights, temperatures and what it looks like when it goes wrong.

The library

Every book rests on a library of research documents, each written to a brief on one question: how hot the forge, how strong the brine, how much ground for a cow. The documents are numbered in one run across the series. FEASTING holds numbers 1 to 158, and the next book begins at 159, so a number names one document for good.

The library is machine-written and uneven. Some documents are careful and well sourced, some copy each other, some carry figures that no one has yet checked. We publish them as they are, with the book's verdict beside each one, because a reader who can see the evidence can judge it.

The Honest Broker

Every chapter carries a section called the Honest Broker. It says which of the chapter's documents can be trusted, which rest on one another and so count as a single witness, and what the chapter had to supply from its own knowledge. Where a chapter recorded a verdict on a document, the library shows it on the document's page.

The log

Every claim a book prints is a row in its log: the claim, where it stands in the chapter, what it must be checked against, what the check found, and the sources. The rows that could hurt someone if they were wrong, the brines, the jars, the knife and the well, are marked and checked first. A row stays open until a source is found, and the log says plainly when a figure is the book's own arithmetic.

If you can close a row, the row's page tells you how to propose a source.

How the site grows

A new book brings its own chapters, its own library, numbered on from the last document, its own log, and its own collection, as FEASTING brings the Menu. The Index, the Calendar, the Numbers, the Workshop, the Sources and the Letter belong to the whole series, and each new book adds to them. A topic in the Index gathers documents, chapters and rows from every book that touches it.

Licence

Proposed and not yet decided: the research library under the Creative Commons licence CC BY-SA 4.0, and the books' own text reserved.

Colophon

Set in EB Garamond, as the books are, with Source Sans 3 for the bench and JetBrains Mono for the figures. The plates were drawn for the book in the manner of the woodcuts in Agricola's De re metallica of 1556, black on white. The site is built from the books' own working files, so nothing is typed twice. It sets no cookies and carries no tracking. The search runs in your own browser.