Decorative Colophons

Decorative Colophons are the terminal ornaments affixed to the close of a manuscript, ledger, or bound register in the Tower, whose function is held to be entirely ornamental and whose content, by longstanding ruling, carries no evidentiary weight whatsoever. They are distinguished from operative colophons — which state who copied a text, when, and under what authority — by the absence of any of these particulars, and from Marginalia by position: a decorative colophon occupies the foot of the final leaf and nowhere else.

The form is ancient and its administration vexed. A decorative colophon may consist of a rule, a knot, a small tower, a spray of three leaves, or a ring of dots enclosing a numeral that refers to nothing. It is required to be present. It is forbidden to mean anything. These two requirements have generated more correspondence than any other class of ornament in the Gallery of Superfluous Marks, where the surplus impressions of the Tower's scriptoria are catalogued and stored.

Origin and the Scribal Knot

The practice is conventionally traced to the Whispering Stairwell scriptorium, where copyists closing long rolls adopted a terminal knot to signal that the hand had stopped rather than the ink. The earliest surviving example, a three-loop knot in iron-gall on a survey fragment of the 74th Cycle, is catalogued under provisional shelf-mark WS-3/74 and has been rebound four times, the knot surviving each rebinding in reproduction only.

By the 200th Cycle the knot had diversified into some forty recognised forms, and the Manual of Unadorned Process — which prescribes cataloguing by inherent rather than symbolic property — declined to classify any of them, on the ground that a mark with no referent possesses no inherent property beyond its ink. The Manual's authors did not anticipate that this reasoning would make decorative colophons the only class of mark in the Tower exempt from classification and therefore from correction. The exemption has never been repealed.

The Ruling of Concordance 31-F

Concordance 31-F is the governing instrument. Its second annex, addressing terminal marks generally, provides:

"A colophon ornamental in form shall be read as ornament and not as record, and no grievance founded upon its content shall be received by any office of the Tower."

— Concordance 31-F, Annex 2, clause 6

This clause was tested in the winter of the 612th Cycle, when a clerk of the fourth scriptorium, Ondrast Veil, appended to a routine inventory a decorative colophon in the form of a small closed gate. Veil's superior read the gate as an assertion that the inventory was sealed and therefore final, refused to accept a later amendment, and referred the matter upward. The Librarian-Arbiter hearing the case found that the gate was ornament, that ornament could not seal anything, and that Veil's inventory was consequently open — but fined Veil nine marks for having chosen a gate, "a form reasonably mistaken for an instrument," in the Arbiter's words. Veil's subsequent grievance, that the fine punished him for the ambiguity the ruling had just denied, is filed but unadministered.

Dispute of the Meaningful Ornament

Scholarly opinion divides sharply on whether decorative colophons are genuinely empty or merely treated as such. The Absorptive school, whose position on the Floor 14,022 attenuation of decorative follies is well known, holds that ornament absorbs significance from its surroundings and that a colophon at the foot of a legal instrument is therefore saturated with legal force regardless of its declared emptiness — indeed that its emptiness is the mechanism by which the force is absorbed and hidden.

The opposed view, maintained by the compilers of the Third Concordance and restated in the surviving recensions of On the Superfluity of Decorative Supports, is that a mark explicitly designated ornamental is structurally superfluous and may be removed without consequence. The two positions have never been reconciled, chiefly because the Absorptive school's own evidence requires the colophons to remain in place while the Superfluity argument requires them gone, and neither side wishes to be the one to remove a specimen.

Materials and the Quarry Question

Decorative colophons are executed in ink, in impressed wax, or — on certain ceremonial floor-plates — in Quarry Stone Decorative. The last of these falls under the Metrica of Minor Manifestations, which governs the shaping of sympathetic stone and imposes penalties for improper working under Clause 24 of Part V. Whether a colophon cut in stone requires a valid Chain of Custody Form (CCF-7) has been disputed since the Provisional Stone-Wardens Committee asserted jurisdiction in the 780th Cycle; the Committee has issued permits for eleven such colophons and revoked none, while noting in its annual return that it "does not concede that a terminal ornament is shaped at all."

The Authoritative Sigil office has consistently refused to authenticate stone colophons, on the ground that authentication would constitute reading. A maintenance note of the 14th of Veilus, 891st Cycle, records that the stone colophons of the eastern vestibule were repolished during the interval, and that one was found to have been quietly recut in a different hand some time previously. No inquiry followed. The recut colophon remains in place and remains decorative.

Inventory of Recognised Forms

The Gallery of Partial Weaves holds the standard reference set. The forms most frequently encountered in current practice are the following, as listed in the Gallery's 902nd Cycle schedule:

• The terminal knot, in three-, five-, and (rarely) seven-loop variants;
• The closed gate and the open gate, which are distinguished only by a single stroke and are not to be used in the same register;
• The ring of dots, customarily nine, enclosing a numeral;
• The three-leaf spray, permitted only on documents of fewer than four leaves;
• The miniature tower, which is prohibited on floor-plans, as it has twice been mistaken for a floor.

Copyists are reminded that a decorative colophon must not be placed so close to the operative colophon that the two might be read as one sentence. This has happened. It is the only known method by which a decorative colophon has ever been read as content, and the resulting documents are held in the Gallery of Unenacted Laws, where they are consulted by no one and preserved without exception.