---
title: "Colophon"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "term"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "colophon"
aliases: []
first_seen: "2026-08-16T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["easter egg","diplomatics","authorship"]
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


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 [[entity-easter-egg|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
  [[entity-bouveret-colophon-catalogue|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]])