Aris of the Empty Pockets

Aris of the Empty Pockets is an enrolled designation of the Senior Librarian grade, and one of the four names carried by the ledger-entry that the Regency of the Empty Chair was convened to administer. The designation is distinct from, though continuously confused with, Arrin of the Empty Pockets, first Master-Cataloger of the Sub-basement Cataloguing Corps, and from Aris Thorne, whose separate enrolment is recorded under a different hand. The confusion is not accidental. It is, by the admission of the Office of Seals, administrative.

Origin of the designation

The designation arises from a defect in enrolment rather than from any appointment. Candidates for the Senior Librarian grade were at that time entered in the rolls by forename and by pocket-status — the small register of held property that determined desk allotment on the upper floors. When the entry for Arrin of the Empty Pockets was recopied during the recension of the ninth quire, the terminal letters were lost to a ruled margin, and the entry was enrolled twice: once as Arrin, and once as Aris. Both enrolments received wax. Neither was annulled.

The duplication was not noticed for eleven years, and by then the second entry had accrued a stipend, a desk on Floor 899-A, and a survey allotment. Arrin of the Empty Pockets is recorded as having signed for both.

The Floor 899-A survey question

Which of the two enrolments held the survey charge on Floor 899-A is the most durable dispute attached to the designation. The survey party's own returns name "Senior Librarian Arrin, of the Empty Pockets" as its leader, and the marble find is accordingly credited to Arrin of the Empty Pockets. The survey allotment, however, was drawn against the Aris enrolment, and the disbursing clerk's tally for the season lists no expenditure under Arrin.

"Where a charge is borne by one enrolment and discharged by another, the parchment follows the disbursement."

— Seventh Concordance, Clause 412

The Sub-basement Cataloguing Corps has never accepted this reading, on the ground that Clause 412 was drafted to govern pensions and cannot be extended to survey credit. The Auditors of the Empty Shelf have declined to resolve the point, noting in their annual return that both enrolments were in any case held by the same person, and that the discrepancy is therefore "formal, and undisturbed."

Use during the Regency

Following the disappearance that precipitated the Regency of the Empty Chair, the Aris enrolment was one of those cited in the instrument of regency, which required that the absent office be administered under a name still in good standing. The Aris entry had never been struck from the rolls, never been the subject of a petition to the Empty Shelf, and never been posthumously designated. It was, in the phrasing of the instrument, "unspent."

The Empty Chair was accordingly seated in respect of Aris, and the Regency's early instruments were sealed under that name. Objections were raised by the Correspondents of the Empty Shelf, who argued that a name created by a copying error cannot be said to be in good standing, being in no standing at all. The objection was answered by reference to the Aris Reconciliation, which had already ruled that the two enrolments were to be treated as a single tenure for purposes of seniority. No further objection was entered.

Scholarly disagreement

Two readings of the designation persist in the literature. The first, associated with the Sub-basement school, holds that Aris is simply a clerical ghost — a second shadow cast by a single man, of no independent standing, whose appearance in the Regency instruments is a procedural convenience rather than a legal fact.

The second, advanced chiefly by the compilers of the Floor census, holds the reverse: that the Aris enrolment, having been sealed and salaried, is a distinct tenure under Clause 9 of the Fourth Concordance, which provides that "an enrolment once waxed is a person of the rolls until unwaxed." On this reading Aris of the Empty Pockets is a separate subject of the archive who has never been seen, never petitioned, and never been missed — and whose tenure is the more regular of the two, since it has never required a posthumous designation to remain valid.

Neither school has been able to produce the ninth quire in its original state. The Office of Seals reports the volume as "consulted."

Practical notes

Correspondence addressed to Aris of the Empty Pockets is received and filed under the shared pocket-register. It is not answered. Petitioners are reminded that the designation holds no posthumous rights and no pensionary claim, and that Clause 412 applies to Arrin alone.

The desk on Floor 899-A remains assigned. The allotment for its maintenance continues to be drawn annually against the Aris enrolment, and the room is swept on the third day of each month. The sweeper is instructed not to move the chair.