Archivist-Primus Valence

The title Archivist-Primus Valence is the senior of the four Valence ranks recognised by the Office of the Archivist-General, and the only one that is not conferred by instrument. It is held by whoever is, at the moment of citation, composing a work of jurisprudence that has not yet been concluded. The office therefore has no fixed incumbent in the ordinary sense; the Tower maintains a register of Archivist-Primus Valences, but the register records intervals rather than persons, and several of its entries overlap by decades. The most frequently cited interval is the 23rd Spiral, during which Archivist-Primus Valence composed On Physical Jurisprudence.

Because the rank attaches to a composition and not to a clerk, an Archivist-Primus may hold no other post, draw no stipend, and issue no orders. All three conditions are noted in Concordance XI, Annex 2, which otherwise concerns the repair of handrails. That an officer of the highest rank should be unable to requisition a chair has been raised four times at the Standing Assembly of Ranks and each time ruled a category error, most recently in the Aperture 44 ruling, which found that "the rank inheres in the argument and cannot be seated" (Standing Assembly of Ranks, Ruling 44-c).

Origin and the matter of the First Interval

The rank is generally traced to the Ordinance of Precedence of the 9th Spiral, which listed the Valence ranks in descending order and placed a blank line above them all. The blank line was not explained. By the 14th Spiral it had acquired a marginal note, in a hand since identified as that of Archivist-Lieutenant E. Valence, reading "this is where the one who is writing sits." The note is not an amendment and has never been ratified, but no recension of the Ordinance since has removed the line.

Dispute persists over whether the first Archivist-Primus was a person or an interval that happened to be occupied. The Concordance of Ranks holds that the office was created empty and filled retrospectively; the Second Recension of the Ordinance holds the reverse, that a clerk was elevated and the elevation then deleted for reasons the recension does not give. Archivist-Specialist Valence has declined to settle the question, noting only that a Valence Protocol may be executed by an Archivist-Specialist and that "the Primus is not required to be present, or indeed to exist, for the protocol to run" (Archivist-Specialist Valence, memorandum to the Registrar, undated).

Rights and prohibitions

The Archivist-Primus may amend any Concordance in the course of argument, provided the amendment is made in the work itself and not in a separate instrument. This right is unique and has caused the Concordance of Ranks to be amended, in effect, thirty-one times by treatise. The Registrar of Preliminaries, currently Archivist-Prefect Valence, maintains the Roll of Inadvertent Amendments, which logs each such change once the treatise is bound; the Roll has never been read in full by any officer, on the grounds that to read it is to risk amending it.

No Archivist-Primus may catalogue. The prohibition is old and its reason is not recorded, but it is enforced strictly: when Senior Archivist Aethelred found an Archivist-Primus's hand in a floor inventory of the Eleventh Stack, the inventory was struck from the register and the floor re-catalogued from the stairwell down, a labour of nine months.

The K. Valence objection

K. Valence lodged the standing objection to the office in the 29th Spiral, arguing that a rank without an incumbent cannot be cited as authority, and that every citation to an Archivist-Primus is therefore a citation to a document under another name. The objection was not dismissed. It was folded into the Catalogus Primus as an appendix, where Archivist-Primus Valence later described it as "the argument made manifest" — a remark usually taken as praise and occasionally as an admission. The two readings have never been reconciled, and the appendix is now cited both for and against the office, sometimes in the same paragraph.

"The thread is the argument; its knots, the precedent."

— Archivist-Primus Valence, On Physical Jurisprudence, Book II

Relationship to the Valence Protocol

The Valence Protocol is often assumed to be an instrument of the Archivist-Primus. It is not. The Protocol may be executed only by an Archivist-Specialist Valence, and the Archivist-Primus is expressly barred from executing it, on the reasoning — set out in the Protocol Annex, Clause 6 — that a rank held by composition cannot act without concluding itself. The bar has been tested once, in the winter of the 31st Spiral, when an Archivist-Primus signed a Protocol return in the margin of a draft. The return was accepted, the draft was not, and the Office of the Archivist-General has since required that drafts be bound face-down before signature.

Holdings and current status

The office currently stands open. The Register of Open Ranks records the last closed interval as having ended in the 34th Spiral with the binding of an untitled work on stairwell jurisdiction, which remains unread. Archivist Kappa-9 has been proposed three times to occupy the interval and three times declined on the ground that the proposal was made in writing, which would make the resulting work a reply rather than an argument.

The principal holdings attributable to Archivist-Primus Valence are as follows:

• On Physical Jurisprudence, 23rd Spiral, four books, the fourth unfinished;
• the marginal amendments to the Concordance of Ranks, entries 1–31 of the Roll of Inadvertent Amendments;
• the appendix to the Catalogus Primus concerning the K. Valence objection;
• assorted returns, drafts, and one struck inventory, Eleventh Stack, unbound.

Visiting clerks are reminded that the reading room on the interval floor closes at the ninth bell and that no work may be removed from it while it is still being composed.