Re: Quire signatures revisited

[Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    > John Grove: I don't think he was - someone else changed the
    > order of the pages after the QS were written.

Yes, we know that from the bathtubs picture in the bio section. 

    > Generally speaking, the QS' follow 1 through 17, with 12 and 16 missing.
    > I'm not sure about the 19 & 20 for two reasons: all the other QS' use the
    > Latin abbreviation for 'us' or even 'mus' following the numeral

Cuiriosity: does the us/mus choice matches the Latin endings?

  PriMUS    
    SecundUS 
    TertiUS
    QuartUS
    QuintUS 
    SextUS
  SeptiMUS
    OctavUS
    NonUS 
  DeciMUS 
  UndeciMUS
  DuodeciMUS
  TerdeciMUS 
  Quartus deciMUS
  Quintus deciMUS
  Sextus deciMUS 
  Septimus deciMus
  Octavus deciMUS 
  Nonus deciMUS 
  VicesiMUS 
  Vicesimus priMUS
    Vicesimus secundUS ...

    > and 19 & 20 don't.
    
As numbers get large, ordinals become increasingly cumbersome,
and people tend to switch to cardinals.
Perhaps quire 19 was such a breakpoint?

    > Secondly, all the quire signatures are on the bottom right of
    > the page - except for #20.

    > The purpose behind a QS as far as I know is to tell the person who will bind
    > the manuscript for you what order the folio's go in - and are normally
    > (correct me please if I'm wrong here) evenly and consistently spaced
    > throughout one manuscript (I.e. - if one quire consists of 16 'pages' then
    > all quires should equal 16 'pages if they are part of the same 'book').

But not if the "book" is a gathering of several separate booklets
that were written separately, as seems to be the case here. 

Note that quire sizes are fairly uniform *within each section*:

  herbal 1st:         7 quires, 4 bifolios/quire, 4 pages/bifolio
  zodiac:             3 quires, 1 bifolios/quire, 6 pages/bifolio
  biological:         1 quire,  5 bifolios/quire, 4 pages/bifolio
  herbal 2nd+pharma:  3 quires, 2 bifolios/quire, 6 pages/bifolio (mostly)
  stars:              1 quire,  6 bifolios/quire, 4 pages/bifolio
  
The 'astro/cosmo' section is the most scattered and the most
non-uniform in terms of binding.

    > Therefore, QS#9 which is oddly placed immediately following QS#8 marker is
    > dramatically out of place - There should be 15 pages in between the two with
    > QS#9 being the final page of that quire - not the first!  What this means is
    > that Quire number nine probably begins with f67r2 (a rather nice title
    > page), followed by f67v2 - then 12 missing pages, then f67v1 and finally
    > f67r1 (dividing the cosmos into 12 sections and immediately preceding the
    > first zodiac section #10).
    > 
    > Following this same 'logic', then the QS #10 on f71v1 (Aries dark) should be
    > the final page of Quire 10. This could mean that the first page of Quire 10
    > is Pisces, followed by f70v2 diagram, 12 'other' pages, f70r1, and finishing
    > with f71v1.
    >
    > I realize there seems to be room for a lot of speculation here on what type
    > of material could possibly be filling the void between Pisces and Aries
    > Dark - and why they should be separated from the next rather long series of
    > zodiac pages in Quire 11 - Which I would see as having 8 pages of zodiac and
    > 8 missing pages of 'data' probably surrounding the  'Light Aries and
    > Taurus'.

Ouch, I ran out of synapses at this point. Let me build a paper model...

Anyway, I do agree that the pages were folded, bound, and numbered in
the wrong order. Obviously the person who wrote the numbers could not
read a daiin, and did not look very closely at the images either.

In particular, based on word frequencies and plant images, I think
that 'pharma' was written before 'herbal A', and that 'herbal B' was
written much later --- and/or was based on a very different source.

All the best,

--stolfi