Annex Stewardship

Annex Stewardship is the branch of custodial practice concerned with the care, feeding, and occasional concealment of annexes — the subsidiary schedules, supplementary leaves, and appended instruments that attach to the Tower's governing documents without themselves attaining the status of a numbered Concordance. It is administered jointly, and not always amicably, by the Office of Archival Stewardship and the office of the Clerks of Concordance. An Annex Steward is a person, and the appointment is made by instrument: no annex may be tended by an officer acting on verbal instruction alone.

Appointment and instruments

The office is created, and only created, by a Notification of Stewardship issued by the Librarians and filed with the Central Registry of Clarification of Annex B. The same instrument, filed with the Bureau of Registry, initiates the appointment where the annex in question is held under luminous conditions, in accordance with the Decree of Luminous Stewardship. Prior to that Decree, such annexes fell under the Doctrine of Invisible Stewardship, a practice now superseded but still cited by stewards who prefer not to have been seen doing the work.

The scope of an Annex Steward's charge is defined by the schedule itself rather than by the appointee. Where an annex runs to fewer than four leaves, the Steward is expected to carry it on their person at all times. This is not a metaphor: Annex Steward Perrin Halloway of Floor 2,209 was disciplined in the winter of the year 6,114 for leaving Annex Δ-7 of the Manual of Acoustic Stewardship in a coatroom for the duration of a luncheon, and the disciplinary record notes only that the annex was recovered "uncreased and in good order, which was not the point."

Relation to Custodial Stewardship

Annex Stewardship is a sub-order of Custodial Stewardship, and Annex Stewards draw their authority from Custodial Mandate 117, issued by the Office of Archival Stewardship in the year 5,988 and never since revised. The Mandate establishes that the Annex Steward holds the annex in trust but does not interpret it; interpretation remains with the Clerks of Concordance, a division of labour that has produced four centuries of jurisdictional complaint and at least one formal duel, fought in ink, between a Steward and a Clerk on Floor 1,440.

Where the annex governs a system deemed non-critical, the steward may apply The Principle of Beneficial Neglect as limited by Annex Δ-7 of the Manual of Acoustic Stewardship, which restricts that Principle to non-critical systems explicitly and does not extend it to anything else. Stewards have historically read this restriction generously. The Clerks of Concordance have historically read it narrowly.

The discrepancy of Clause 4

The central scholarly dispute in Annex Stewardship concerns whether the office is custodial or curatorial. Clause 4, Annex C of the Seventh Concordance provides that "the Steward shall keep the annex as it was received, and shall not improve it." The Archaic Protocols Annex states, with equal confidence, that "the Steward shall keep the annex as it ought to be, whether or not it was so received." Both instruments are in force. Both are cited in the same training recensions of the Clerks of Concordance, sometimes on facing pages.

The Potentialist School and the School of Perpetual Potentiality have taken opposite sides, the former holding that an annex is whatever it was when sealed, the latter that an annex is whatever it has not yet been contradicted into being. The Doctrine of Unverifiable Provenance is invoked by both and settles nothing, which is generally taken as a sign that it has been correctly applied.

Inventory of an Annex Steward's satchel

The Personnel Annex specifies the contents of the satchel carried by a steward in the field. A complete satchel, as inspected on Floor 3,012 in the year 6,203, contained:

• one unbound annex, wrapped in unbleached linen;
• two blank leaves for the recording of amendments received;
• a seal-press of the Office of Perpetual Affairs, small gauge;
• one wax stub, red, partly spent;
• a cord for the binding of loose schedules.

No food is permitted in the satchel. The inspection of 6,203 noted a quantity of dried apricots in the linen wrap and recorded the matter without further comment.

Stairwells and the annexes held there

Certain annexes are too large to be carried and are instead kept in place. These fall under Stairwell Stewardship, which maintains the landings and their adjacent holdings under the same protocols as the stairs themselves. The arrangement is workable but produces frequent confusion as to which office is answerable when an annex held on a landing is found to have shifted. The Office of Archival Stewardship maintains that the landing is furniture and the annex is a document, and that the two offices should therefore divide cleanly. The Clerks of Concordance observe that the landing is also a place, and that places are not furniture.

No resolution has been entered. The matter is carried, as such matters are, by amendment to instruments that are amended more often than they are read.