Appendix Ω to the Third Concordance

Appendix Ω to the Third Concordance is the terminal appendix of the Third Concordance, bound immediately behind the Omega Appendix and immediately before the rear board. It is not to be confused with the Omega Appendix, with the Fourth Concordance, Appendix Ω (which is a different document standing in the same relation to a different parent), or with Appendix Omega, which is a recension and not an original.

The appendix consists of nine leaves of a single discourse, titled in the running head On Matters Falling After the Last Matter, and deals with the classification of subjects that cannot be reached by reading forwards. It was compiled, according to its own colophon, in the winter of the year the Tower records as 1179, by a clerk of the Scriptorium of the Rear Board whose name has been ruled through in every surviving copy.

Contents and structure

Appendix Ω proceeds by exhaustion. Its first four leaves enumerate subjects already catalogued elsewhere and declare them, one by one, to fall outside its scope: the resonant keys of Floor 743, the resonant architecture treated in the Third Concordance's Appendix on Sympathetic Vibrations, the Luminous Sconce Non Corrosive, the physically demarcated areas established by the Cartographic Appendix, and the Null Point at 117.9.0α–0ω as fixed by the Seventh Appendix.

The fifth leaf contains the only passage of the appendix in general circulation:

"What is set down last is not therefore set down least; but it is set down after, and the reader who has come this far has already decided what he will believe."

— Third Concordance, Appendix Ω, leaf 5 recto

Leaves six through nine are given over to a table of forty-one entries, each naming a category of subject that "falls after the last matter" and giving the floor on which the category was, at the time of compilation, believed to be held. Thirty-eight of the forty-one floor numbers cited in the table have since been reassigned. The Office of Annex Concordance has ruled twice that the table is to be read as a record of belief rather than of location, and once, in a fit of what the record calls "the long afternoon," that it is to be read as neither.

Relation to Appendix Δ

Because Appendix Ω is the last appendix of its parent, it has attracted a persistent body of speculation concerning the Appendix Δ, which is sewn rather than bound and which the Office of Annex Concordance has itself suggested may hold subject matter adjacent to Fourth Concordance, Appendix Ω. Three separate petitions have asked that Appendix Ω be opened at its rear seam to determine whether a further appendix was ever attached there and later removed.

The petitions were refused on the authority of the Sewn Appendix practice, which holds that an attachment, once sewn, is a fact about the document and not a question to be put to it. A minority opinion, entered by Clerk Marrow Vesper in 1304 and never withdrawn, argues that the refusal confuses the question of whether something was attached with the question of whether it is still there, and that the second question is answerable by looking. Vesper's opinion has been cited in eleven subsequent disputes and adopted in none.

The Ruled-Through Name

The compilation of Appendix Ω is attributed in the colophon to a clerk whose name was struck out in the same hand that wrote it, apparently before the ink was dry. The Bureau of Errata has declined four times to restore the name, on the grounds that a struck name is a legible fact and a restored name is an inference. The Clerks of the Still Point, established under Clause 501.07α, hold the opposite view and maintain a list of seventeen candidates, of whom fourteen have been eliminated and three are the same person under different designations.

The dispute is not merely antiquarian. Under Procedure 12.ω, codified in Amendment 12 to the Third Concordance, a clerk's name must be legible on the document before that clerk's rulings may be cited in a matter of removal. Since Appendix Ω is the sole authority for three of the rulings cited in the redacted appendix on removing a Reader from office, the question of who compiled it bears directly on whether those rulings were ever citable at all.

Physical description and handling

The appendix is written on nine leaves of laid paper, 214 by 158 millimetres, ruled at twenty-two lines. The hand is a small documentary minuscule of the late twelfth century, with the characteristic backward hook on the descender of g that the Scriptorium of the Rear Board used for terminal matter only. Leaf 9 verso is blank except for a single ruling line and the words nil ultra, which have been read both as a termination and as a complaint.

The binding is original. The rear board is warped, and the appendix has been rebound twice, in 1241 and in 1388, each time with the leaves in a slightly different order. The 1388 order is the one currently in use. Handling instructions require that the volume be opened from the rear only, and that the reader's thumb not be laid upon leaf 5 recto, where the ink has lifted.

Disagreement in the record

The principal scholarly dispute concerns whether Appendix Ω was composed as an appendix at all. The Fourth Concordance, Appendix Ω asserts, in a passage that has never been struck, that its own text "came first and was cut down to fit behind." If that assertion is accepted, the Third Concordance's Appendix Ω is a reduction of a longer work, and the forty-one-entry table is an abridgement of a table of unknown length.

The Office of Annex Concordance rejects the claim as a confusion of the two documents, noting that the Fourth Concordance's appendix is bound in a different hand and cannot therefore have been cut from the same sheets. Marrow Vesper's opinion, by contrast, treats the two as "the same argument made twice, once at each end of the building," and predicts that a full collation would show the Third Concordance's version to be the earlier. No collation has been authorised. The Procedures for Latent Integration, whose authority derives from the Appendix on Ontological Precursors, take no position, and the matter remains open in the sense that it has not been formally closed.