← All conjectures · Book economics & scribal labour
Paying for the pocket
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
“Anticipated in print” means the direction of this claim already appears in scholarship, while this exact test has never been run — it records prior art, not proof; nothing here counts as supported or falsified until a registered resolution says so.
Claim (verbatim)
Naive materials logic says a small book, using less skin, should cost less per word than a big one. The conjecture inverts this: portability was itself a priced good, and small formats commanded a premium per unit of text, because minute script demanded slower, scarcer, higher-grade hands, tighter parchment selection wasted more of each skin, and travelling buyers — friars, students, merchants — paid for the pocket. The thirteenth-century pocket Bible, a famous luxury of miniaturization, is the type specimen. If this holds, price per written area rises as books shrink, and format distributions become readable as a map of who needed to carry their texts versus who could shelve them.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Primary clause (carries the verdict): among priced manuscripts of the same text and century, price per unit of text (per thousand words or per square cm of written area) in the smallest size quartile exceeds that in the largest quartile by at least 30%. Secondary clause: the premium is largest for texts with documented itinerant readerships.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts (SDBM) — prices joined to recorded dimensions and folio counts; the kill is a statistical test across format quartiles.
In the kill-dataset registry:
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
How this item is catalogued
Catalogue tags are curatorial metadata that make the conjecture findable. They are not findings, not a novelty verdict, and naming a source family is not a promise that the data exist or are accessible. Each dimension below says whether it was assigned, reviewed with none applying, uncertain, or not yet reviewed, and who recorded it.
- Place & era tags — Assigned
- Europe; Medieval Tagged by claude-sonnet-5 + claude-fable-5 (gate)
- Dating — Phenomenon
- Dated c. 400 CE – 1500 CE SDBM manuscript prices joined to dimensions/folio counts, format-size price premium; claim's own thirteenth-century pocket-Bible type specimen. Tagged by claude-sonnet-5 + claude-fable-5 (gate)
- Subject — Assigned
- Book economics & scribal labour (from the generation section)
- Finer subject topic — Assigned
- Manuscript and scribal production Tagged by earlier curation lane (link provenance on record)
- Claim level — Assigned
- Record claim Tagged by earlier curation lane (link provenance on record)
- Method — Not yet reviewed
- Evidence source — Assigned
- Prices & wages Tagged by earlier curation lane (link provenance on record)
- Research stage — Idea — no test designed
On Inferpedia
This conjecture is linked to the following pages on Inferpedia, an encyclopedia of the missing — working atlas pages, some still early scaffolding.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Composed blind from the model's own knowledge in a zero-tool session and emitted directly as final text.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The 13th-c. miniaturized pocket Bible and its demanding minute script and thin membrane are well studied, and portability-as-luxury is intuited, but the inverse-materials prediction—price per unit of text >=30% higher in the smallest size quartile—has not been tested on priced same-text manuscripts.
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
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