Each tea is filed as a specimen

Why every tea gets a file number

This is the language of a collector's file rather than a shop window, and tea suits it because a tea is genuinely a record: a place, an altitude, a harvest date, a roast, a lot. The stamps and boxes are there to hold those fields in a fixed order, so the same six facts appear in the same six places on every page and can be compared. The paper grid gives the pile a scale, and the crosshairs mark the frame the way a plate does in printing. Typewriter mono is used for all data because it is the one face that makes a number look like a number instead of a claim. Hand-numbering a lot is an admission of limit — there is only so much of a spring picking, and pretending otherwise is the usual lie of tea retail. The ink-brush mountain is drawn small and kept in the margin, so it stays a note about origin rather than a mood. Nothing on the page is scored, ranked or starred; the file describes and stops.