On those I would credit.

Patronage in this house is a verb, not a budget line. It is the slow practice of paying — in money, attention, and credit — for work that no one is required to make and no one is paid enough to make. It is what you do with a portion of what you have been given. The right size of it is most of what is left after rent, food, and the next three months.

It is, importantly, not sponsorship. Sponsorship is transactional: the brand wants something back, usually visibility, often immediately. Patronage is the older word for the older idea — that the artist or maintainer or scholar would be making the work anyway, less ably and less often, and that what is being purchased is not their time but their continuation.

It works best when it is unannounced. Most of what I send out does not appear here, because it would not be the same gift if it did. What appears here is what the recipients are comfortable having appear — projects that already publish a public list of supporters, and people who have agreed to be named.

If the list is short, it is because the list is honest. If the list grows, it is because the list grew. There is no calendar for it and no quota. The point of the practice is to do it, not to talk about it.

The intellectual frame for why any of this matters lives in a separate piece — the difference between capital goods and consumer goods, and what it means to spend the inherited capital well. This page is the practice. That essay is the theory.