Auto-Contradictory Items

Auto-Contradictory Items are holdings whose catalogue entry, physical description, or certified condition is internally inconsistent at the time of accession, as distinct from holdings that develop inconsistency after cataloguing. The distinction is old and much litigated. A vase that is later found to have been listed under two different floors is an instance of Auto-Contradictory Provenance; a vase that arrived on the docket described as both intact and shattered, in the same hand, on the same leaf, is an Auto-Contradictory Item. The Manual of Epistemological Taxonomy, Annex Delta treats the two under separate heads, and the Bureau of Contradictory Inspection maintains distinct ledgers for each, kept in rooms that do not adjoin.

Definition and boundary

The operative wording is found in the Manual, Annex Delta, clause 9:

"An item is auto-contradictory where its own record refutes its own record, and where neither refutation requires recourse to any document outside the four corners of the entry. Items requiring a second document to contradict them are provenance cases and shall be sent to the Bureau of Contradictory Inspection by the long stair."

— Manual of Epistemological Taxonomy, Annex Delta, clause 9

The clause has been read narrowly since the Winter Recension of the Ninth Concordance, which held that an entry's margins, docket slips, and string-tags count as part of the four corners, while a wrapper is a second document. The result is that an item contradicted only by its own wrapper is, procedurally, not auto-contradictory at all — a ruling that has cost the Bureau a great deal of wrapper.

Auto-Contradictory Items overlap with, but are not identical to, Auto-Refutative Holdings. The latter argue against themselves; the former merely describe themselves inconsistently, often without any apparent intent. A folio that declares itself inadmissible is auto-refutative. A folio catalogued as "folio, single leaf, complete" is auto-contradictory, and the Self Contradictory Folio is both.

Handling classifications

On conclusion of an audit the Bureau of Contradictory Inspection issues Form 7,117-δ, which assigns the item one of five handling classifications. Three of the five are in routine use. The fourth, Status Alpha (Deferred to Verification), has not been cleared since the Fortysecond Concordance revised the Temporary Holding designation, and the fifth is reserved for items that contradict the form itself. Form 7,117-δ is printed on stock heavy enough to serve as a second document, and several items have been reclassified as provenance cases simply by having the form laid on them.

Items under active audit are shelved spine-out in the Hermetic Carrels on floor 1,404, where the air is dry and the tags do not rot. Clerks are asked not to read an item aloud while carrying it, as the reading constitutes a fresh description and may generate a fresh contradiction. A bell rings at the half-hour; the carrels are cleared at the third bell whether or not the audit is concluded.

The Kessarine inventory and the double entry

The largest single accession of Auto-Contradictory Items remains the Kessarine Inventory, received in the winter of the year recorded as 3,118 in the Bureau's calendar. The inventory comprised 212 objects, of which 209 were catalogued as both present and absent, in the same list, by the same hand. The receiving clerk, Ordinal Clerk Mavel Hess, noted in the margin that the three remaining objects were "present, absent, and a hat." The hat was subsequently the subject of a nine-year dispute between the Bureau and the Office of Floor Assignment, which claimed it had been assigned to a floor that did not exist and therefore could not be received at all.

Hess's grievance against the Office of Floor Assignment is preserved in the Bureau's correspondence and is short. It reads, in full: "The floor does not exist. The hat does. I have the hat." The Office never replied, and the hat is now held under Type 2 classification, having begun producing docket slips of its own in the spring of 3,121. The slips are still arriving.

Scholarly disagreement

The Twelfth Concordance held, at annex 6, that an item contradicted on its entry face alone should be destroyed on sight, "lest the contradiction spread to the shelf." The Nineteenth Concordance, annex 6, holds the opposite: that such items are the archive's most honest holdings, since they are the only ones that admit what every entry secretly is. Both annexes are numbered 6. Neither has been repealed. The Protocol for Contradictory Attribution governs which is cited, and it settles nothing, having been drafted by a committee that could not agree on its own preamble.

Practical Librarians resolve the matter by citation order: whichever Concordance is nearer to hand is cited, and the item is shelved in the interim. A minority position, advanced by the Guild of Theoretical Mechanics Proposals (47 items) in its forty-first proposal, argues that the Twelfth and Nineteenth annexes are themselves a single auto-contradictory document and should be accessioned as one item. The proposal was declined on the ground that it was correct.

Notable holdings

The current register of Auto-Contradictory Items runs to four volumes and is itself entered in the fourth volume as "three volumes, complete." Entries of note include:

• The Kessarine Hat, present, absent, and generating docket slips.
• Ledger 88-C, which records its own weight as both 4 lb and 9 lb, and has been weighed twice with the same result each time.
• The Pallid Stairwell, catalogued as having eleven and twelve landings, and ascended on both counts.
• Exhibit 3,000 (withdrawn), withdrawn from exhibition and still on display.

Items may be consulted by written application to the Bureau, on the long stair, between the first and third bells. Visitors are reminded that a reading room may not be entered while it contains a reader.