Vitrine IX
A door that does not open
Every figure in this pavilion was taken from a body of working documents that no reader of the book will ever see. The last measurement is of that body itself.
The criterion
Every Markdown file in the repository except the book’s own text — the English stories, the two unnumbered pieces, the Turkish stories and the assembled Turkish manuscript — counted with the same criterion the book publishes for its own length. Version control, generated output and caches are excluded.
What came back
- Files in the working record
- 363
- Words in the working record
- 837,050
- The English edition
- 50,266 words
- The Turkish edition
- 35,492 words
- The record against both editions
- 9.8 times
- The record against the English alone
- 16.7 times
None of it is served here. Not the panels, not the rulings, not the translators’ disagreements, not the docket, not the seeding notes, not the verdicts. The numbers on these nine pages were taken from those files at the build that produced the pages, and the files stayed where they are.
Where the move comes from
The companion site to this author’s novel Vera holds a vitrine on the same subject and found the formulation for it. Its sentence is not reproduced here; the credit is, and the page is at hulkiokantabak.github.io/vera/method/.
One thing the closed door does not mean
It does not mean the site holds its own copy of anything. The builder of this site parses the book’s own builders and lifts their rules out of them — the typographer, the two body readers, the order, the part names, the counting criterion — so the web edition and the print editions cannot disagree about where a body begins or how a word is counted. If one of those is renamed the build stops and names the file. A companion that drifts from its book is the fault that put a hundred and twenty-seven errors into this project’s own guide, and it is not repeated here.