Abstract Receipt (Series A)

The Abstract Receipt (Series A) is the instrument issued by Receipt and Triaging for submissions that have no physical extension, no measurable mass, and no location in any storey of The Tower. It is the eldest of the three receipt series — preceding the Material Receipt and the Potential Receipt — and remains the most frequently contested, since a Series A receipt must fix in writing a quantity that cannot be weighed. Series A receipts are printed on vellum of a standard weight (forty-one grams per square metre), because the sheet is often the only material object in the entire transaction.

An Abstract Receipt records the sentiment, intention, grievance, or other incorporeal holding as it was submitted; assigns it a Receipt Number in the A-block; and grants it the provisional standing described in Receipt of Anticipatory Intent. Where the submission has been formally received it is entered in the receiving ledger of the floor concerned. Where it has not — and the greater number are not — the receipt is forwarded to the Gallery of Unacknowledged Receipts for storage and cross-reference, in accordance with the arrangement recorded for all three series.

Origins and the Vellum Question

The series is conventionally dated to the winter of the year the Tower records as 1,402, when the Fourth Concordance was amended to distinguish holdings "capable of being dropped" from those not so capable. The amendment did not name the series; it merely required that the two classes be receipted differently, and the scriptoria supplied the distinction themselves. The earliest surviving Series A receipt, held in the Annex of First Instruments, records only a sentiment of mild regret and the clerk's note that it had been "received, weighed at nil, and found to be genuine."

The vellum requirement is older than the series and has never been satisfactorily explained. The Second Concordance, Annex 7, insists that "the abstract may not be inscribed upon the perishable," which the clerks of the Lower Scriptorium have always read as forbidding paper. The Sixth Concordance reads the same clause as forbidding wax tablets only, and the dispute has run since. In practice the Scriptorium holds a standing stock of some nine thousand leaves against the possibility that the Sixth Concordance prevails.

Form and Completion

A Series A receipt carries the A-block number, the date and floor of receipt, the name or description of the submitting party where one can be established, and the abstract holding in the words used at submission. The final field, headed Extent, is the one that causes trouble. It admits no units of measure and no figures; the clerk must instead indicate the holding's extent in prose. The Bureau of Abstract Metrics has twice proposed that the field be struck out, and twice been refused by the Standing Committee on Instruments, on the ground that a receipt without an Extent field "would resemble a Series M and mislead the storekeepers."

Receipts are completed in duplicate. The upper copy travels with the holding; the lower copy stays with the issuing desk and is not to be separated from its ribbon. Clerks are reminded that the second copy is not a spare.

Dispute: The Third and Fifth Concordances

The principal scholarly disagreement concerns whether a Series A receipt may be issued after the fact. The Third Concordance, clause 19, holds that "the abstract is receipted in the moment of its arising or not at all," which would make every late-issued Series A receipt void. The Fifth Concordance, clause 19 (the numbering is coincidental and the coincidence has been the subject of a separate memorandum), holds that the moment of arising is itself unknowable and that receipt may therefore be granted "at the earliest hour the Tower is pleased to fix."

"Where the arising cannot be witnessed, the Tower witnesses what it can, and that is sufficient."

— Fifth Concordance, clause 19

The practical consequence is that a substantial portion of the A-block is of uncertain standing. The Registrar of Contested Instruments estimated in a circular of 1,988 that some fourteen per cent of Series A receipts currently in the ledger would fail under the Third Concordance and hold under the Fifth. The circular proposed that both readings be entered side by side, and the proposal has neither been adopted nor withdrawn.

The Grievance of Clerk Ilvera Sand

In the winter of 1,974 the clerk Ilvera Sand, then assigned to the third receiving desk, issued a Series A receipt for a grievance concerning the length of a corridor. The submitting party objected that the grievance was not abstract but spatial, and therefore belonged to Series M. Sand maintained that a grievance is a sentiment regardless of its subject, and issued the receipt. The matter reached the Office of Series Assignment, which ruled in Sand's favour but added a note to the A-block guidance: "the abstractness of a holding is determined by what is submitted, not by what it is about." Sand's marginal annotations on the ruling — thirty-one words, in iron-gall ink — are still consulted, and the desk's copy is kept under glass.

Relations with Series P

The boundary between Series A and the Potential Receipt is the source of the second great dispute. A sentiment not yet felt but reasonably expected is a potential holding and takes Series P; the same sentiment, once felt, takes Series A. The Doctrine of Independent Invention, most often invoked during Receipt and Triaging, permits a holding to be entered in both series where its status is genuinely uncertain, provided the two receipts are cross-referenced in the margin of each. In 2,011 a Series P receipt was issued for a regret that had not yet occurred and a Series A receipt for the same regret four days later, when it did. Both are held in the Hall of Provisional Entries.

Storage and Losses

Series A receipts are among the most frequently lost instruments in the Tower, since the holding they describe cannot be produced to verify them. The Gallery of Unacknowledged Receipts maintains the principal store, arranged by A-block number, and reports an annual attrition of about one receipt in six hundred — a rate the Gallery attributes to damp. A visiting rule of long standing requires that no Series A receipt be carried through a stairwell between the ninth and fourteenth turns without a second clerk in attendance, a precaution introduced after the loss of the entire A-4,100 block in a single afternoon. The block was later recovered, with the exception of A-4,107, which remains unaccounted for and is listed as outstanding in every annual return.