I'm not trying to renew any debate about the origins of the VMS.
I'm trying to explain why your idea that someone was trying to encode a mystery into one letter of one of the quire numbers is very unlikely. The people who added the quire numbers may not have had any knowledge whatsoever about the origins or contents of the VMS and there's nothing unusual about superscripting one or more letters of quire numbers.
I'm trying to explain why your idea that someone was trying to encode a mystery into one letter of one of the quire numbers is very unlikely. The people who added the quire numbers may not have had any knowledge whatsoever about the origins or contents of the VMS and there's nothing unusual about superscripting one or more letters of quire numbers.