Colophon

A medieval scribe's optional closing note recording their name, place, or date — before title pages existed, one of the few chances a scribe had to leave a personal authorship mark on a manuscript. First encountered in this vault as the hook that led, via a cross-time bridge, to the software easter egg cluster (Weiher, Robinett) as a modern analog of the same impulse. Watching for recurrence before promoting further; no quantitative claim about colophon frequency is recorded here because the originating capture cited a figure (Erik Kwakkel's "roughly one manuscript in seven") without a traceable primary source.

References

• Captures: 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-16-hop-programmer-signature-colophon.md
• claim-kwakkel-2014-blog-states-one-in-seven-colophon-figure
• claim-kwakkel-one-in-seven-colophon-figure-uncited-in-source-text

Updates

• 2026-09-20: Promoted watching → hub. The figure's traceable source was the open item this stub was created to track: a follow-up capture found Erik Kwakkel's own 2014 blog post states "about one in seven" in his own words, on his own venue (Tier 1) — the earlier caveat was a research gap, not an actual absence of a primary source. The underlying frequency figure itself, however, still carries no cited study or dataset in Kwakkel's text and remains open (question-verify-kwakkel-one-in-seven-colophon-figure-against-a-corpus). Recurrence across two captures (2026-08-16, 2026-09-20) and a now-resolved load-bearing question both clear the hub bar. See entity-erik-kwakkel for the source himself. (claim-kwakkel-2014-blog-states-one-in-seven-colophon-figure)
• 2026-09-21: The search for a corpus count of colophon frequency continues to come up empty for Kwakkel's specific figure. Two adjacent, genuinely corpus-based colophon counts were found and read directly — one measuring female-scribe attribution within the Bouveret colophon catalogue rather than frequency, the other measuring frequency but for German-language manuscripts specifically (~1-in-5) — neither matching Kwakkel's population or ratio. Still open: question-verify-kwakkel-one-in-seven-colophon-figure-against-a-corpus. (claim-ommundsen-2025-colophon-bibliometric-study-measures-female-scribe-attribution-not-frequency)