Appendices to the Concordances

The Appendices to the Concordances are the accumulated documentary layer by which the Third Concordance, the Seventh Concordance, and the Tenth Concordance — collectively, the Governed Three — extend their authority into matters their principal clauses do not address. They are not Concordances and do not carry the weight of Concordances. They are formally subordinate, habitually decisive, and in practice read more often than the texts they enlarge. The distinction is maintained with some care in the archive and not at all on the floor.

Form and Classification

An appendix is entitled, sealed, and dated, in that order; an appendix sealed before it was entitled is void, and one entitled before it was drafted is a Filing Error of the fourth degree under Clause 5. Compound classes exist for archival purposes — the Silvicultural Appendices (Annex D-7), the metaphysical proprietorship bureaus of Annex Ω, the exploration protocols gathered in Annex Δ — but these are shelving conventions, not powers. The powers reside in the individual instrument.

The accretion is not tidy. The general furnishings of appendix practice — supplements, amendments, accreted rider clauses — are catalogued separately under Annexa, which treats the layer as a whole rather than its contents. Fourth Concordances records the parallel case of the Concordances that have been amended so often that their original clauses are cited only by antiquarians.

Authority and Dispute

Because an appendix may not contradict its parent Concordance, disputes turn on whether a given appendix does contradict it, and this question has never been settled in a way that has held for longer than the tenure of the Librarian settling it. The Twelfth Concordance, Amendment Gamma governs the use of brass clasps on clasped appendices in one matter only: the Sixth Concordance specifies the same clasps and does not say for what. Both are in force. A filing clerk working the ninth scriptorium in the winter of the year recorded as 3,411 is said to have clasped an appendix to the Sixth and, on discovering the Twelfth's narrower scope, unclasped it, whereupon it was returned to her by the night office with a note reading only, "It has been read."

Appendices also generate instruments of their own without instruction. These Phantom Appendices appear spontaneously in otherwise stable volumes and are regarded as evidence of a Documentary Phantom, a diagnosis first made in the Cartilaginous Expedition reports and never improved upon.

Circulation and the Seals

Librarians ratify appendices by affixing the Seal of Inclusion, an act that has been performed at least once on a document that had not been drafted and was never afterwards drafted, a matter still listed as open in The Concordance Update Y54315445. Circulation is managed by citing schedules, of which the Twelve Citing Concordances for Appointment Procedures and Investigative Purview is the most consulted and least accurate, having been superseded in eleven of its twelve entries while remaining the only schedule copied to every floor.

The appendices are also the principal cause of Ambient Footnote Drift, the slow migration of annotation from one page to another which has obliged the scriptoria to re-sew certain volumes every four years and to inspect the bindings for other reasons on the seventh. The physical condition of the corpus is treated in For Immaterial Phenomena, which argues, against the weight of the order, that the drift is a property of the paper.

Status of Persons

No article on the appendices is complete without the case of the marginal note of uncertain authority. The Spiral 9 Manuscript codified "Spiral Nostalgia" in its appendices to govern the tendency of long-filed papers to be remembered differently by the offices that filed them. The ruling was applied to a clerk named Oren Fesh, who maintained for nine years that a rider clause had been struck from a Ninth-Concordance appendix under Ninth Concordanceclause 404 and could not be shown where. The ninth scriptorium ruled that his memory was not evidence but that it was, "in this instance, consistent with the record, which is a heavier thing" — Ninth Concordanceclause 404, marginal gloss 2. The gloss is not part of the clause. It has nonetheless been cited in every subsequent dispute touching the appendices, and once, in error, in a matter concerning the maintenance of the east staircase.

"An appendix that goes unread for a hundred years does not expire. It waits."

— On the Origin of Concordances, marginalia, hand unidentified

That sentence contradicts the Twenty-Second Concordance, which fixes a lapse of ninety years for unconsulted instruments. The contradiction is known to the Librarians, has been raised six times, and appears in no ruling. The archive maintains both texts without preferring either, a practice defended on the grounds that preference is a matter for the floors, and the floors have decided: they cite the marginalia.