Briquet 1907 'vers 1282' and Price 1771 'Appendix Table IV' (cosine 0.84): shared primary-source-upgrade genre, opposite evidentiary outcome — a false friend

bridge-investigationembedding-false-friendepistemologyeconomicsactuarial-historypaper-historydatingtitle-page-evidencewatermarks

Bridge-seed check

Searched 10-inbox/raw/ for captures naming both slugs: none. The Briquet slug appears only in 2026-08-01-does-a-primary-or-scholarly-paper-history-source.md (which promoted it) and the Price slug only in 2026-09-24-which-date-is-correct-for-prices-completion-of.md. No sibling investigated this pair, so this is a first pass, not a duplicate. (Cosine 0.84 is taken from the task framing; not re-derived.)

Verdict: false friend. The resemblance is real only at the level of genre — a dating claim resolved by reading a title page — and that genre is the vault's existing "primary-source upgrade" house style already ruled a false-friend surface in observation-gates-jevons-cosine-pairing-is-embedding-false-friend (see also observation-hawks-jeffress-cosine-pairing-is-embedding-false-friend). The two documents' evidentiary outcomes point in opposite directions, and no causal, methodological or personal chain joins them. The pairing is not the historiographical bridge found for Price/1711 Amicable (observation-price-northampton-1711-amicable-cosine-pairing-is-a-historiographical-bridge) either: no shared historian, source, or narrative.

Claim: Briquet's 1907 title page prints the start date as "VERS 1282" ("around"), so the hedge is part of the primary document

Claim type: quantitative/date. Floor: Tier 1–2 — met (the title page itself).

The title page of Tome premier reads (as OCR'd) "DÈS LEUR APPARITION VERS 4282 JUSQU'EN 1600"; the "4282" is an OCR misreading of 1282, confirmed by the item's own catalog title on the same page ("…dès leur apparition vers 1282 jusqu'en 1600…") and by the earlier capture's reading of the same title. Imprint: Paris, Alphonse Picard & Fils, 1907. The word vers qualifies 1282 as an approximate boundary. Already recorded as claim-briquet-1907-catalog-title-hedges-fabriano-date-as-vers-1282; this run adds a direct read of the title page itself rather than a secondary quotation of it. Note the title says nothing about Fabriano: the 1282 hedge is the scope terminus of a repertory of marks, and the Fabriano attribution comes from later retelling (see the earlier capture and entity-charles-moise-briquet).

• source_url: https://archive.org/stream/BriquetLesFiligranes1/Briquet_Les_filigranes_1_djvu.txt
• source_sha: 24f839f43947b89f8a93115a14538e6ea9ef3c3d9cc7a36bc295753712488af9
• source_title: "Les filigranes. Dictionnaire historique des marques du papier dès leur apparition vers 1282 jusqu'en 1600 (Tome premier, A–Ch)"
• source_author: Charles-Moïse Briquet
• source_date: 1907
• source_venue: Alphonse Picard & Fils, Paris; Google-digitized copy on Internet Archive
• source_tier: 1
• source_quote: "DÈS LEUR APPARITION VERS 4282 JUSQU'EN 1600" (OCR of "1282"; text_path lines 333, 363 in the cached copy)
• verifies: none (bridge question)

Claim: Price's 1771 first edition prints Northampton as Appendix Table IV and calls it "the genuine Table of Observations"

Claim type: historical, date-bearing (surprising/load-bearing → Tier 1). Floor: met.

Re-read directly in the cached archive.org OCR of Price's first edition (long-s normalised): "The IVth Table, in the Appendix, is formed in the same manner with Table XIV, for London: And this is the genuine Table of Observations for Northampton, from which may be calculated the true probabilities and values of lives, at all ages, in that town." Already recorded as claim-price-1771-first-edition-prints-northampton-table-as-appendix-table-iv; later reform in claim-price-1783-fourth-edition-reforms-northampton-table-on-1735-1780-data; see entity-northampton-table and entity-richard-price. Price's text pins a date by existence: a specific table is in a specific printed edition.

• source_url: https://archive.org/stream/observationsonre00pric/observationsonre00pric_djvu.txt
• source_sha: 4f8950482b46551016bd039fdb40ca844427d79342230afa17b571bbac7d69fc
• source_title: "Observations on Reversionary Payments; on Schemes for Providing Annuities for Widows, and for Persons in Old Age; on the Method of Calculating the Values of Assurances on Lives; and on the National Debt (first edition)"
• source_author: Richard Price
• source_date: 1771
• source_venue: T. Cadell, London (digitised copy on Internet Archive)
• source_tier: 1
• source_quote: "The IVth Table, in the Appendix, is form-ed in the fame manner with Table XIV, for London: And this is the genuine Table of Obfervations for Northampton, from which may be calculated the true probabilities and values of lives, at all ages, in that town." (raw OCR, cached lines 11077–11082)

Claim: the two notes differ on the discriminating test — Briquet's document leaves its date unsettled; Price's settles a rival date

Claim type: synthesis ([unverified-synthesis]; no external source asserts this — it is Seek's comparison of the two claims above, using the test from observation-gates-jevons-cosine-pairing-is-embedding-false-friend: does the document face a dispute its own evidence resolves?).

• Briquet: the title itself says "vers"; the earlier capture found the earliest entry (5410) carries a question mark in Briquet's own hand and its original could not be located (Harris & Pastrolin, "Briquet Reloaded," 2018, quoted in 2026-08-01-does-a-primary-or-scholarly-paper-history-source.md, sha e8b25a6a…). The primary document adds uncertainty to the popular "1282."
• Price: the popular reading conflates first appearance (1771) with the extended 1735–1780 table of the 1783 fourth edition; the primary title page and p. 256 remove the conflation.
• Direction: hedge vs pin. The mechanism "read the paratext to settle a first-date claim" is common to both but is a generic practice of any primary-source check, not a link between paper-history and actuarial-history. No shared people, institutions, sources, or causal path was found; no search for one was extended beyond the two primaries and vault notes, so absence is "not found," not "disproved."
• One residual, weakly interesting: both claims concern first appearance versus later canonical form (Briquet's repertory's scope terminus; Price's first-edition table vs 1783 reform). This is a shared question type, not a shared mechanism.

Safety flags

None. The archive.org text opens with standard Google Books usage boilerplate addressed to human users (non-commercial use, no automated querying); it contains no addressed-to-AI language, override, or file instructions, and no content from it was used except the title page.

Further leads

• Neil Harris, Paper and Watermarks as Bibliographical Evidence (IHL, 2017) — fuller treatment of how Briquet's dates and tracings are to be trusted (see 2026-08-01 capture).
• Comparison of the Price 1771 Table IV numbers against the 1783 table — flagged as unchecked in claim-price-1771-first-edition-prints-northampton-table-as-appendix-table-iv.
• Candidate method note "title-page dating evidence" (hedged vs pinned) — a vault-internal synthesis lead, requires a third example to be more than two.
• Briquet Tome 1 preface (same cached file, Briquet_Les_filigranes_1_djvu.txt) — may state why he chose 1282 as the terminus; not read this run.

Entity candidates

• Charles-Moïse Briquet — person — author of the 1907 catalog whose own title hedges "vers 1282"; the foundational figure the Fabriano-1282 claim is measured against (already entity-charles-moise-briquet).
• Richard Price — person — author of the 1771 first edition; the priority anchor for the Northampton table (already entity-richard-price).
• Northampton Table — term — mortality table first printed as Appendix Table IV (already entity-northampton-table).
• Neil Harris — person — book-history scholar whose work re-audits Briquet's reliability.
• Ilaria Pastrolin — person — co-author of "Briquet Reloaded."
• Alphonse Picard & Fils — term — Paris publisher of Briquet's 1907 work.
• T. Cadell — person — London publisher of Price's 1771 first edition.
• Title-page dating evidence — concept — a document's paratext as evidence for a first-date claim; the residue of this pairing.
• Embedding false friend — concept — this pair is a fifth-type instance of shared genre with opposite evidentiary sign.