"The Registry Has One Column: Theophrastus's Characters as a Named Authorial Function" is a paper by Lee Sharks (v0.1, 6 September 2026) that reads the Characters as an operation rather than a genre. Each of the thirty sketches runs one engine: a hedged definition in the treatise's own manner, then τοιοῦτός τις, οἷος … and a καί-chain of infinitives — a disposition rendered as a registry of characteristic deeds with name, scene, verdict and theory removed. Examined on its own terms, the book is a πίναξ of sorts in the purest measured descriptive register; in terms of Plato, it keeps the sorts Athens is made of (the Republic's democratic man is already a sketch inside an argument; the Apology's ἔστιν τις Σωκράτης is grammatically a Character) and strips the drama; in terms of Aristotle, it shares the Ethics' objects and lacks its scale — thirty vices, no mean, no virtue: the registry has one column — while EN IV 7 restores the name the sketch removed (οἷον καὶ Σωκράτης ἐποίει). One trait, irony, runs the whole line — Socrates's method in Plato, an anonymous vice with ἀποροῦμαι among its stock evasions in the Characters, the deficiency about truth in the Ethics — and so traverses three named authorial functions: person, sort, example. The paper states the three modes as operations indexed by names (dramatize; extract, classify, register; organize, explain) and tests the middle one on its proper control, Aristotle's own sketches of ἤθη in Rhetoric II: the same genre under the other name explains where the Characters enumerate (γάρ 259 against 37 per ten thousand; cause-demand 3.02 against 0.74 per thousand) and names where they mark sorts (τις/τοιοῦτος 9.0 against 16.4). Two earlier supports are retracted on the same run: the descriptive/explanatory register recurs within each name at equal magnitude, and the Ethics' frame vocabulary is EN-specific. Nothing about dates, hands, or membership is asserted. Extracted from the notebook The First Draft; companion to Aristotelian or Theophrastan (#1583) and Beautiful and New (#1579).