Annotator Valerius

Annotator Valerius is the designation carried by the annotator assigned to the marginal apparatus of the Redactions Copy, a role held by fourteen individuals in succession and, on one disputed reading, by a fifteenth who has not yet been appointed and whose initials nevertheless appear in the endpapers of Volume III. The designation is not a personal name in any sense the registry recognises; it is attached to the desk, not the occupant. Nonetheless, all fourteen are catalogued under the single heading, and the Office of Voluntary Correspondence has twice declined to separate them on the grounds that "a hand is a hand; the signature persists whether or not the man does" (Memorial 44, Annex 2).

Function of the office

The annotator's task is neither to correct the Redactions Copy nor to complete it. Per Third Concordance, Annex 9, the annotator is to describe what each omission has removed without restoring it, so that the shelf may be said to hold a book defined by what it does not contain. The formulation is older than the office it governs and was quoted, with modifications, in Annotator Valerius's own preface to Volume VII: "the shelf is defined by what it does not hold, and held to account for it" (Preface to the Redactions Copy, Volume VII, §3). Scholars have argued for eleven years over whether the inserted clause is Valerius's or belongs to the earlier recension.

Because the annotator writes in the margins of a book that is itself a margin, the office produces a second-order record — annotations on annotations — which the registry files under the designation "residual" and which no one has read in full since the Ledger of Persistent Anomalies was last reconciled in the winter of 8,214.

The Annotator's Regress

The office is best known for the dispute known as the Annotator's Regress, in which the annotator annotated his annotation of an annotation and could not be persuaded to stop. The Regress occupied the division for a period the Concordant Law records only as "the greater part of a shelf," and the annotator is reported to have produced, at its height, a marginal note describing a marginal note describing a missing paragraph, each note shorter than the one above it by precisely one word.

"The regress terminates not by exhaustion but by consent, and consent is not to be sought from the annotator."

— Commentaries on Adjudicatory Precedence, Vol. XII, §41

Following the dispute, Advisory Pamphlet Sigma-7 was circulated to all reading rooms, advising that marginalia of the fourth order and beyond be marked with a terminal dagger and left unexamined. The pamphlet is four pages long. It is one page long if the dagger notes are disregarded, which the pamphlet itself recommends.

The Regress has since been cited in at least two unrelated adjudications on the ground that anything that annotates itself must eventually stop, and that consistency requires the same courtesy to be extended to litigants.

Dispute with Archivist-Loremaster Valerius

Annotator Valerius's long quarrel with Archivist-Loremaster Valerius of Division V is the best-documented incident of the office. The Archivist-Loremaster, principal architect of Manifold Purist Speculative Topology and a leading proponent of the Doctrine of Necessary Inconsistency, maintained that a book which omits is obliged to omit something; the Annotator replied, in a note now catalogued separately as the Valerian Gloss, that a book may omit the fact of its omission and that this is the only honest omission.

The correspondence ran to forty-one letters, of which thirty-nine survive. The two missing are the subject of a standing query lodged with the Office of Voluntary Correspondence and answered, each quarter, with the observation that the letters are not lost but unannotated.

The dispute was never formally resolved. It was instead referred to the Archivist-Logothete Valerius Kappa, who found that both parties had departed from the applicable Concordance but declined to say which, and who ordered the file sequestered with a note, in her own hand, that the annotator "should know better, and does."

Relation to other Valeri

The office is frequently confused with the several other Valeri recorded in the archive. It bears no formal relation to Librarian-Scribe Valerius, author of the Commentaries on Adjudicatory Precedence, Vol. XII, though that work is the only commentary to treat the office at length, and it is entirely distinct from the High Librarian Valerius who authored the Manual of Auditory Demarcation. The confusion arises from the registry's practice of collating all Valeri under a single index heading, from which Archivist Valerius was struck following his total referential dissolution and into which Inquisitor Valerius was admitted with an annotation of his own — a note which, if read as written, makes the inquisitor an annotator, and which the Concordant Law has not yet seen fit to correct.

Registry practice

Successive annotators are distinguished only by the volume in which they made their first mark; they are not numbered. The current occupant's first mark appears in Volume XI, in the lower margin, and consists of a single terminal dagger of the kind recommended by the pamphlet and, per the pamphlet, not to be examined.

Annotators are not to annotate the catalogue of annotators. The rule is stated in Third Concordance, Annex 9, and has been broken by every annotator since the fourteenth. Pencils are prohibited in the endpaper rooms.