The hired pen pads the page

Claim (verbatim)

The hired pen pads the page. This connects hisba-literature complaints about copyists with measurable page economics. The market inspectors' manuals warn that copyists paid by the quire enlarge their script and widen spacing to inflate the folio count. If the warning tracked real practice rather than moralist boilerplate, the effect should be visible in the surviving books: commissioned commercial copies should carry systematically less text per page than copies scholars made for their own use, holding the text itself constant, because the self-copying scholar economizes paper while the hired pen monetizes it.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

For a high-copy-count school text such as al-Ajurrumiyya or the Alfiyya of Ibn Malik, copies whose colophons mark commissioning (bi-rasm formulas, named patrons) show a median text density (words per page, computed from the known text length, folio count, and lines per page) at least 15% lower than copies marked as self-made (katabahu li-nafsihi). Primary clause: the 15%-or-greater median density gap; the verdict follows it. Secondary fallback: the direction alone (commissioned copies less dense, p<0.05).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: FIHRIST and Süleymaniye Library catalogue records, which give folio counts, lines per page, and colophon formulas for dozens of dated copies of these matns.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

The hisba manuals' warnings about copyist fraud are edited and translated (al-Shayzari's Nihayat al-Rutba and its successors), so the mechanism is anticipated in the sources themselves, but no one has tested whether commissioned copies show measurably lower text density than scholars' self-made copies of the same text.

Predictions

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