Annex A (Alpha)

Annex A (Alpha) is the designation allotted to the smallest certified annex in the Tower, a single chamber of 4.1 by 2.9 metres situated at the junction of the Transfer Floors Alpha-3 through Alpha-7 and the western stair of Spatial Team. It contains one reading lectern, one stool, and — by the reckoning of every survey taken since 14 Vertens 891 — no holdings. Annex A (Alpha) is nonetheless the most heavily amended piece of space in the archive, and Librarians will travel four days to stand in it.

Status and designation

The annex is a schedule entry of Annex Alpha, and derives its peculiar standing from the definition of the condition "unsequenced" set out there for hinge-points lacking a floor number. Annex A (Alpha) has never carried a number of its own. The 707-Alpha recension records it only as a "reserved void contiguous to the Alpha progression," a phrase drafted in haste and litigated ever since.

Because the annex is unsequenced, amendments to it must be ordered under the Annex Alpha Amendments Amp Precedence before they take effect. The schedule requires each amendment to be read aloud in the chamber it amends. The chamber holds one stool. Amendments to Annex A (Alpha) are therefore read standing, and the practice has hardened into custom: the reader stands, the witness stands, and the door is left open.

The Amendment Ledge

The lectern in Annex A (Alpha) carries a shallow shelf, forty-one centimetres wide, known as the Amendment Ledge. Amendments to the annex are deposited there after reading and are not removed. The Ledge presently supports 1,206 slips of vellum at a mean thickness of 0.4 millimetres, and the lectern has been re-shimmed twice.

A 962 ruling by the Office of Vertical Records held that an amendment deposited on the Ledge is not thereby enacted, since the Ledge is furniture and furniture does not promulgate. The ruling was appealed on the ground that the Ledge had been surveyed as a fixture in 908 and as furniture in 954; the appeal remains open, and the Ledge is presently listed twice in the Inquest Ledger 502-Alpha, once under each description.

"Annex A (Alpha) is empty. This is not a finding of the survey. It is a property of the annex, and surveys that return holdings from it are surveys of the corridor."

— Annex Alpha, Clause 1.α.1, marginal recension of 914

Incidents

In the winter of 918 a junior clerk, Merrow Quill, was dispatched to verify the annex's dimensions against the Containment Schematics for Spire Annex 7 and returned with a measurement of 4.6 by 3.2 metres. Quill's figures were entered into Standard Operating Protocol 12-Alpha and stood for eleven years. They were struck in 929 when a second surveyor, working in the same chamber with the same chain, obtained 4.1 by 2.9 and noted that Quill had measured the corridor as well.

The matter might have ended there. It did not, because the 914 recension quoted above had already ruled that surveys returning holdings from the annex are surveys of the corridor, and Quill's defenders argued that a survey returning dimensions from the corridor was the same error in a different dress. The Office of Vertical Records accepted the argument in 931 and struck the corridor from the annex's certified extent. Two further surveys in 933 and 937 included the corridor again, apparently from habit, and were struck in turn. The corridor has since been struck from Annex A (Alpha) four times and restored three.

Quill was reassigned to the Stack of Open Argument Annex Alpha in 920 and petitioned for restoration of the lectern stool in 934. The petition was granted. The stool was not returned.

Scholarly disagreement

Whether Annex A (Alpha) is a constituent part of Annex B or a separate and merely adjacent void is the longest-running dispute in the annex's record. The Stack of Open Argument holds forty-one briefs on the question and eleven counter-briefs, the earliest dated 897. The strict reading, advanced by the Alpha Purists, holds that Annex A (Alpha) is a clerical residue of the Alpha series and ought to be struck altogether.

The opposing view, which the Librarians have neither adopted nor forbidden, is that the annex is the only chamber in the Alpha series certified to hold nothing, and that striking it would leave the series without a standard against which holdings could be counted. A 941 memorandum in the Inquest Ledger puts the case plainly: "the annex holds nought, and nought is the figure against which all other figures are measured" (Inquest Ledger 502-Alpha, memorandum of Librarian Ostrey Vane, 12 Ferrant 941). No Concordance has settled the point. The Temporary Scaffolding of '09-Alpha was erected against the annex's west wall in 909 to support a stack that was later found to be in the corridor, and has not been removed.

Access

Annex A (Alpha) is unlocked at all hours and may be entered by any Librarian of the third grade or above. Visitors are asked to leave the door open and to sign Tier Alpha on the way out, not on the way in. Prior reservation is not required and has not been accepted since 949.