The bookseller's ghosts

Claim (verbatim)

The bookseller's ghosts. This connects Ibn al-Nadim's profession with the mortality structure of his catalogue. The Fihrist of 377 AH was compiled by a warraq from stall-level knowledge: it records inventory, including the ephemera of a living market that scholars never canonized. A title known only from the Fihrist, never echoed by the later biographical and bibliographical tradition, was commercially alive but institutionally dead already in 987, because survival ran through teaching, endowment, and citation, not through shelves. Single attestation by the bookseller is thus itself a death certificate with a lag of a few centuries.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Titles attested in the Fihrist but absent from the major later tradition (al-Dhahabi, Ibn Khallikan, and Hajji Khalifa's Kashf al-Zunun) survive in extant manuscript at no more than one-third the rate of Fihrist titles that are also cited later, and the absolute survival rate of Fihrist-only titles is under 3%. Primary clause: the at-most-one-third relative survival ratio; the verdict follows it. Secondary: the under-3% absolute bound.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Ibn al-Nadim's Fihrist (Tajaddud edition) cross-referenced against the FIHRIST union catalogue and OpenITI author-title metadata, with Kashf al-Zunun as the later-attestation screen.

Novelty / leakage triage

provisional — model-triaged, shepherd review pending

A provisional first pass authored by the model (Opus), not yet confirmed by the shepherd. It carries the same dated-search requirements as an authoritative verdict but is excluded from every headline figure and cannot underwrite a prediction until a shepherd confirms it. Provisional reading: Adjacent (closely related prior work exists).

The premise and even the item's absolute bound are close to a known figure: of the ~7,000 titles listed in Ibn al-Nadim's Fihrist (compiled 377/987 by a warraq from stall-level knowledge), only about 2% survive -- so the item's secondary 'under 3% absolute' clause is nearly documented, and that survival ran through teaching/endowment/citation rather than the shelf is the standard reading. Not located: the item's differential-survival test that carries the verdict -- Fihrist-ONLY titles surviving in extant manuscript at <=1/3 the rate of Fihrist titles also cited by the later tradition (al-Dhahabi, Ibn Khallikan, Hajji Khalifa) -- crossed against the FIHRIST union catalogue with Kashf al-Zunun as the later-attestation screen. Overall attrition documented; the later-attestation-conditioned ratio is unrun.

• al-Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadim -- overview of listed vs surviving titles (~2% extant) — The bookseller's catalogue and the scale of loss; supports the item's <3% absolute clause
• FIHRIST union catalogue and OpenITI author-title metadata, screened by Hajji Khalifa's Kashf al-Zunun — The kill dataset for the Fihrist-only vs also-later-cited survival differential

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.