Amendment 881 to the Third Concordance

Scope and issuance

Amendment 881 to the Third Concordance is a numbered amendment concerning the disposition of items recovered from floors that no longer agree with their own shelf-marks. It was issued in A.W. 6108 and is currently classified under Concordance Amendment Tracking as a Second-Order Procedural Clarification, a designation it has held since the recension of A.W. 7440 and which the Directorate of Concordant Integration has twice contested without success.

The Amendment is set out in four clauses and a marginal note whose status is disputed; see Disputed sections below. Its original exemplar is held in the Scriptorium of Marginal Notes, where it is catalogued as a loose sheet and therefore, under Third Concordance, Clause VII, is not considered part of the Concordance proper until re-sewn. Re-sewing has been requested in each of the last nine inventory years.

Text

The operative language of Clause 2 is reproduced here from the second recension, which is the copy most frequently cited and the copy whose clause numbering differs from the original by one.

Where a shelf-mark is found to designate a floor which in turn designates a different shelf-mark, the item bearing the mark shall be held at the nearest stair for one (1) turn of the inventory, and thereafter moved to the floor which first claimed it, provided that floor can be reached without passing a floor that has renumbered itself.

— Amendment 881 to the Third Concordance, Clause 2, second recension

Clause 1 establishes the condition; Clause 3 provides for the case where both floors claim the item; Clause 4 provides for the case where neither does. Clause 4 occupies most of the Amendment and has been the subject of more commentary than the other three combined, largely because it consists of a single sentence that runs to 411 words without a full stop.

Application

The Amendment is applied most often on the upper mid-levels, where renumbering is frequent and where the Department of Provisional Shelf-Marks maintains a standing detachment. Its practical effect is to create a class of items that are technically in storage and technically in transit at the same time, a distinction which the Ninety-Seventh Amendment later relied upon in an unrelated matter concerning unclaimed volumes of the Ledger of Anticipated Disputes.

A typical invocation: an item on Floor 4,117 bears a mark reading 4,117/3, which resolves to a sub-floor that was absorbed into Floor 4,119 in A.W. 6102. The item is held at the stair for one inventory turn, then moved to 4,117, which declines it on the grounds that it has since been reclassified as a corridor. The matter is then heard under Clause 4.

Visitors are reminded that stair-holds are not deposits and confer no custody; the Librarian on duty will not receipt for an item left against a door.

Disputed sections

The marginal note appended to Clause 3 — reading, in the original hand, but see 901 — is the principal point of scholarly disagreement. One school holds that the reference is to Third Concordance, Amendment 901 and that procedural misdirection of an item therefore does not constitute a claim on it. The opposing school, led for many years by the Scriptorium's own Keeper of Loose Sheets, holds that the note refers to a now-lost amendment of the same number and that importing 901 into the text is precisely the kind of retrospective alignment the Seventh Addendum to the Third Concordance was issued to prevent.

The dispute is unresolved and is unlikely to be settled while the exemplar remains un-sewn. A third position, associated with the Directorate of Concordant Integration and with Amendment 12β to the Third Concordance, holds that the note is decorative. This position has not been endorsed by any Concordance and is not cited in current practice.

Related instruments

Amendment 881 is frequently read alongside Third Concordance, Amendment 17.δ where an item subject to a stair-hold also carries a sanctioned affect, and alongside Amendment 9-d where the shelf-mark's ambiguity has itself been the subject of a prior clarification. Its relationship to Third Concordance Amendment Xiv Clause 9 — which governs the parallel case of floors that have renamed themselves without renumbering — was examined by the Office of Concordant Integration in A.W. 7433 and declared "orthogonal, and therefore not in conflict," a finding that has since been cited eleven times and applied twice.

The Amendment remains in force. It has never been amended.