---
title: "About & Manifesto"
description: "What bumnote is, who makes it, and the four rules we print by."
kicker: "Manifesto"
author: "Bumnote Desk"
date: 2026-09-01T00:00:00+01:00
---

**bumnote** is an irregular independent broadsheet. We publish essays on counterculture, cassette archaeology, rogue typography, and underground music philosophy, and we publish them as plain text first and HTML second.

The name comes from the Miles Davis line about wrong notes. A bum note is not a failure. It is an obligation to play the next one well.

## Four rules

1. **Text first.** Every piece is a Markdown file with YAML front matter. If the site generator vanishes, the archive is still readable.
2. **No trackers, no telemetry, no consent banners.** We do not know who you are and we have arranged things so we cannot find out.
3. **Print it.** Anything on this site may be photocopied, stapled, and left in a record shop. Please do.
4. **Keep the hiss.** We do not sand off the imperfections in a recording, an argument, or a page.

## Colophon

- **Engine:** Hugo (extended), building from flat Markdown files.
- **Type:** Bricolage Grotesque for headlines, Literata for prose, Space Mono for labels and marginalia.
- **Colour:** unbleached newsprint, carbon ink, signal orange, street amber.
- **Shapes:** zero border radius, hard-edged offset shadows, the occasional 1.5° sticker tilt.
- **Client script:** under one kilobyte, for the inverted-reading toggle and a copy button.
- **Licence:** Copyleft / anti-copyright, CC BY-NC 4.0. Take it, credit us, don't sell it.

## Contact

Post: bumnote press, c/o the basement. Wire: `desk@bumnote.com`. We answer letters faster than email, because letters are rarer.