A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away - or more precisely, in 2015 on the Cipher Mysteries blog, Nick Pelling made a post about the quire numbers in the VMS and his observation that they have an unusual format has lived in my brain ever since.
This is the blog post: You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view.
Ever since I read that blog, whenever I browse through a manuscript I take a moment to scan for quire numbers in the hope that I might see a quire-counting system like it, and I have never found a good match. Nick has a You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view. and at the time he suggested that there might be four different scribes who wrote or emended the quire numbers. I am not sure if I agree that 4 different people wrote or emended the quire numbers, but I agree that there is a lot of variation in both the numerals and the grammatical endings and it is worth keeping in mind that these variations exist.
As the quire numbers are believed to have been added after the VMS had been rearranged at least once, the quire numbers probably(?) represent the work of later owners or librarians rather than the work of the original scribes of the VMS, but I was hoping that we could use this thread to share similar quire numbering formats if we ever find any as it might help to identify some of the subsequent owners or users of the manuscript.