9 The colophon

The earliest printed books had no title page. To learn who made one, you read to the last leaf, where the printer set a few lines of his own: his name, his city, the year, and often a word of thanks that the labor was over. This was the colophon, and for a generation it was the only place a book admitted to having been made at all. When the title page arrived and carried the announcements to the front, the colophon kept the craftsman’s share: the name of the type, the paper, the size of the edition, sometimes the names of the people who sweated over the formes.

Your software deserves the same last leaf. An about box, a footer, a block at the end of the release notes: who built this, where, with what, in what year. Four lines, ten minutes of writing. Say plainly that a devil set the type. The finest presses named their compositors in the colophon, back when the compositor was flesh,¹ and the habit is worth reviving now that the compositor is not. The certification never came from the hand that set the type anyway. It came from the shop that pulled the proofs and signed the run.

The colophon names the maker, the town, the materials, the year. It does not print the shop’s ledger, its correspondence, or its list of customers, and no reader ever called that silence shifty. The buyer is owed the truth about the object in hand. The interior of the shop is nobody’s business. So publish the toolchain, the version, the record of what changed and when. Keep the transcripts of your sessions with the devil, and the names of the people you print for.

There is a difference between withholding and hiding. A rights page that prints registration number pending tells the truth twice: about the paperwork, and about the shop’s habit of saying so. Dropping the line is quieter and slightly false, because a reader who looks for it will assume an answer you never gave. The same holds for software. Restores are tested by hand each month; automation is planned beats a page of borrowed badges. Mark the pending. An honest blank is a promise with a date on it.

The old printers’ marks worked the same way. The dolphin wound around the anchor, the orb under the double cross: small devices cut into the book to certify its origin, in an age when a good edition drew counterfeits within the season. The mark claimed one thing, that this shop and no other made this. It said nothing about the shop being large, or modern, or the finest in the city. Sign your run in that spirit, smallness included. A printer who ran off two hundred copies said so in the colophon, without apology; the number was a fact about the book, and facts about the book belong there. Write built and kept by two people and a devil the same way. The customer who needs a thousand-person vendor was never yours. The one who needs the work done well would rather know exactly who stands behind it, and how few doors there are to knock on.

The rights notice deserves the same honesty, and here the irreverent tradition is the truthful one. One press sets, under its device, a notice to the effect that anyone may reprint the work who does not pretend to have set it themselves. Every word of it is true, because it claims exactly the protection the press intends to enforce, which is nearly none. Set beside it the usual boilerplate: all rights reserved, in the sternest type, from a shop that has no lawyer and never will. Ask what you would actually do if someone copied the work. If the answer is ask for credit and get on with the next run, print that. A reader can tell which kind of shop wrote each notice, and trusts the honest one with the rest of the page.

The colophon also fixes the work in time, and this matters more now than it did. In the year of our Lord told a later reader what tools and knowledge the maker could have had. Your year does the same. Say the system was built in a particular year, with the devil of that year, and a reader can judge it against what was possible then. You can reread it without flinching, too. Nobody faults a hand press for lacking rollers that had not been invented.

And with that line set, this manual is done. The shop is ready when the question is it done has standing witnesses. The proofs were pulled and read by someone hunting for trouble. The count was checked against the order. The devil’s work passed under eyes that owed it nothing and had refused it before. Every one of those witnesses could have said no. A witness who cannot refuse is an ornament. When the last of them has nodded, set the colophon: name, place, tools, year. Pull the run. Lower the lamps on your way out. The press will want making ready again in the morning.