Addendum 404-β

Addendum 404-β is a supplementary instrument of the Sixth Concordance, designated under the beta series and ratified on 14 March of the eleventh administrative cycle. It governs the recording and retention of documents that cannot be located, and it is chiefly remembered — where it is remembered at all — for establishing the office of the Absent Record, whose clerks are charged with maintaining accurate descriptions of holdings that no longer exist or never did. The addendum runs to nine folios, of which four are themselves missing from every known copy; the missing folios are, by the addendum's own terms, the operative ones.

Origin and ratification

Addendum 404-β arose from a dispute between the Bureau of Enumeration and the Office of the Stacks over a shipment of forty-one codices that arrived at the Floor of Received Things in the winter of the tenth cycle and could not afterwards be produced. The Bureau held that the codices had never been received; the Office held that they had been received and then mislaid. Both parties agreed, unusually, that the truth of the matter was unknowable and that the disagreement itself should be catalogued rather than resolved. The Librarians ratified Addendum 404-β to give that disagreement a permanent form. Its preamble states the governing principle in a single sentence: "What is recorded as absent is, for the purposes of the Concordance, present."

This sentence is the subject of a long-running dispute with the Seventh Concordance, Annex 2, which holds the opposite view in nearly identical wording. The contradiction has never been reconciled. A note in the margin of the sealed copy held at the Scriptorium of the Third Landing reads only "both, then," in a hand that has not been identified.

Structure of the instrument

Addendum 404-β is organised in three recensions. The first, the Recension of Plain Description, sets out the ordinary form for describing an absent item: its title where known, its dimensions where estimated, the date of its last confirmed sighting, and the name of the clerk who last confirmed it. The second, the Recension of Disputed Description, applies where the sighting itself is contested; it provides for the item to be described twice, once by each party, with neither description marked as preferred. The third, the Recension of Nothing, applies where the parties cannot agree even that there was an item. It consists, in its entirety, of a blank ruled page and the instruction "leave as found."

Cross-references to Addendum 48-51 appear in the operational scope of the instrument, though the passage in which they are made falls on the second missing folio. Later annotators have supplied the reference by conjecture, and the conjectural reading is marked as such in all circulating copies. See also Addendum 9, whose treatment of unlisted holdings is cited twice in the first recension and nowhere in the third.

"The absence shall be described as though it were an object, and the description filed in the place where the object would have stood. Nothing shall be added to the description on the ground that the object cannot be consulted."

— Sixth Concordance, Addendum 404-β, Recension of Plain Description, clause 3

The Absent Record and its clerks

The addendum created the post of Keeper of the Absent Record, first held by the clerk Osric Vane, who had served the Bureau of Enumeration for nineteen years and who accepted the appointment on the condition that the post carry no office and no fixed hours. Vane's tenure is recorded chiefly through his objections. He maintained that clause 3 could not be applied to items whose dimensions were unknown, since a description without dimensions is not a description; the Librarians replied, citing Addendum Kappa, that a description may be complete without being informative. Vane's Memorial of Grievances, filed in the seventh year of the eleventh cycle, lists one hundred and six such objections and closes with the observation that "the Record grows heavier each year while nothing in it grows larger."

Under Vane's successors the office settled into its present practice: absent items are described on standard cards, the cards are filed in the order in which the items were first found to be missing, and the file is consulted whenever a floor inventory fails to balance. The practice works well enough that most discrepancies are now resolved by consulting the Record rather than by searching the stacks. Expeditions to the upper floors are instructed to check the Record before reporting anything lost, and to check it again before reporting anything found.

Application and revision

Addendum 404-β has been amended eleven times, most recently by the Ninth Revision, which extended the instrument's reach to items missing from floors that have themselves not been located. The Ninth Revision was ratified over the objection of the Office of the Stacks, which argued that the addendum now purported to describe absences within absences and had become "a catalogue of nothing, filed in a place we cannot point to." The Librarians rejected the objection without comment. Procedural clauses in the Fifth Addendum were copied from the Third Addendum, and the same clauses reappear in modified form in the Ninth Revision, so that the revision's procedure for recording an unlocated floor is textually identical to the procedure for recording a misplaced folio, save for the substitution of "floor" for "folio" throughout.

Scholars disagree on whether this substitution was deliberate. The Concordance Commission of the Ninth Cycle held that it was a scribal error and recommended correction; the Standing Committee on Interstitial Matters held that it was intentional and that the distinction between a folio and a floor is, in the absence of either, not a distinction the Tower is obliged to maintain. Neither body has authority over the other, and both cite the Addendum Proviso in support of their positions. The question remains open. Readers consulting sealed copies of Addendum III are reminded that the Record's holdings are not duplicated there and should not be sought on the third landing.

Under the addendum's standing instruction, the Absent Record is not to be shelved, bound, or removed from the reading room, and no one may request an item from it by name. Enquiries are received in writing and answered in the order in which the enquiries themselves are found to be missing.