Adherents of the Final Catalogue

The Adherents of the Final Catalogue are a body of readers and copyists, first attested on Floor 4,044 (The Anticipatory Shelf), who hold that the Main Catalogue has already been completed in every particular and that the work of the Tower consists not in adding to it but in discovering what it has always contained. The body is small, literate, and constitutionally impatient with the rest of the archive. Its members do not describe themselves as authors, compilers, or even correctors. They describe themselves as finders, and they regard every entry written since their founding as a rediscovery imperfectly executed.

The Adherents maintain no scriptorium of their own. They work instead in the margins of other bodies' floors, a practice that has produced the bulk of the complaints lodged against them under Concordance 44-B, which permits marginal annotation but not its subsequent removal.

Doctrine

The body's position rests on a single proposition, recorded in the Compendium of Unwritten Prefaces at the fourth recension: that a catalogue of subjects which do not exist cannot grow, because there is nothing outside it for it to grow toward. From this the Adherents conclude that the Main Catalogue is already complete and that apparent additions are the archive catching up with itself.

"What is written was always written; what is being written is the same writing, arriving late."

— Compendium of Unwritten Prefaces, Fourth Recension, folio 9

This places them in direct opposition to Clause 11: Doctrine of Incompletability, which asserts that no catalogue of unreal subjects can ever be considered final or comprehensive. The Adherents have not disputed Clause 11 in writing. They have instead annotated it.

The Anticipatory Shelf and the Winter Recension

Floor 4,044 takes its name from the practice of shelving holdings that have been described but not yet catalogued — a limbo of some eleven thousand items. In the winter of Year 3,108 the Adherents undertook to demonstrate their doctrine there by producing a complete index of the floor's unlisted contents without opening a single volume. The index, known as the Anticipatory Index of Floor 4,044, ran to nine folios and was substantially correct in the case of two items.

The remainder of the index described holdings which did not then exist and, in the case of folio 6, an entire sub-floor that has since been built to the specifications given. Whether this constitutes vindication or a maintenance obligation is a matter the Adherents decline to clarify, observing that the distinction is one their critics have invented.

Dispute with the Guild of Final Verbs

The body's most sustained quarrel is with the Guild of Final Verbs, which holds that certain catalogue language can be closed but not reopened, and which regards the Adherents' habit of finding entries that were never written as a grammatical offence. The Guild's position is set out at length in On the Ghost in the Catalogue, which describes the Adherents' method as "a sentence with no subject, confidently punctuated" (Guild of Final Verbs, marginalia, unnumbered).

Matters hardened after the Adherents submitted a finding to the Librarian of Coherence concerning Holding 9,999-A. The Guild contends that the holding is an administrative error; the Adherents contend that the error is the holding, and that it was catalogued before the mistake occurred. The Librarian of Coherence has ratified neither submission, having noted that both are legible.

Relations with Other Bodies

The Adherents are frequently confused with the Adherents of the Palimpsest of Floor 1212, whose stratigraphic recitation they consider a commendable but slow approach to a text already finished. Correspondence between the two bodies exists for the years 2,914 to 2,930 and consists largely of the Palimpsest declining to answer. The Adherents have also been mistaken for the Administrative Nihilists, a comparison they resent: the Nihilists hold that nothing need be catalogued, while the Adherents hold that everything already has been.

They are not represented among the Sphere-Adherents, and the Adherents of the Persistent Page, who operate out of the Scriptorium of the Interleaved Page, have twice requested that the Adherents stop annotating their bindings. Copies of the Chronicler's Loop have been found in Adherent quarters, though the body denies using them on the grounds that an infinite reservoir writes only what is already there.

Criticism and the Finding of Year 3,204

Critics of longest standing point out that the doctrine is unfalsifiable by design: any entry the Adherents predict is either confirmed, in which case the doctrine holds, or found absent, in which case the archive has not yet caught up. The Pursuit of Specific Holdings has catalogued nineteen such predictions and describes the method as "shelving backwards."

The most serious blow came in Year 3,204, when the Adherents located a complete and independently attested entry for a subject for which a Certificate of Final Form had already been issued. Under the procedures of the Manual of Final Closures, a second entry cannot stand beside a certified one. The Adherents argued that the certificate had been issued for the discovery rather than the entry, and that both were therefore the same document. The matter was referred, under Annex 12 of Concordance 44-B, to the Scriptorium of Final Recourse, which has not ruled. Its bench is presently occupied by the original entry, awaiting a decision on whether it exists.

Visitors to the Anticipatory Shelf are asked to leave the reading lecterns facing the stairwell and to report any entry they find already written. A register for this purpose is kept at the desk. It has been full since Year 3,011.