Autogenist School

The Autogenist School is a body of cataloguing opinion holding that any subject entered into the Tower's registers whose origin cannot be traced to a named first cataloguer must nonetheless be treated as though it arose of itself, and should be recorded, shelved, and cited accordingly. The School maintains that the search for a first entry is not merely futile but procedurally improper, and that a subject's presence in the register constitutes the whole of its warrant. It is a small school, though it has never been smaller than it is now, a formulation its own clerks regard as the strongest statistical claim the Tower permits.

The Autogenists are frequently and incorrectly conflated with the Unsaid School, which holds that certain subjects should not be entered at all. The distinction is preserved in Concordance XV, Annex 2: where the Unsaid School omits, the Autogenist School enters without ascription. Clerk-Adjunct Hesper Vane observed in her 4th memorandum that "the Autogenist does not decline to name the author; he declines to look," a formulation the School has neither adopted nor disputed, on the grounds that disputation would require a search.

Origins

The School's founding is conventionally dated to Year 61, when the sub-registrar Orrin Mallory was asked to produce the first entry for a subject subsequently catalogued as The Unwritten Ledger of Floor 88. Mallory searched the register for eleven years, produced three inventories of near-matches, and in Year 72 filed a notice stating that the subject "has no ancestor in these records and no obligation to acquire one." The notice was countersigned by the Office of Recensions and copied into the standing minutes, where it appears between a maintenance schedule and a complaint about damp.

"A first entry, once granted, is indistinguishable from a first entry never written. The register is not improved by the failure to find one."

— Orrin Mallory, Notice on Unascribed Entries (Year 72), clause 4

Mallory's position was resisted at once by the Foundationalist School, whose members argued that an entry without a traceable first cataloguer was a gap wearing a title. The dispute ran without conclusion for four recensions and is recorded in the Foundationalist-Autogenist Correspondence, a body of letters notable for the fact that neither side's archive contains the other's replies.

Doctrine

Autogenist doctrine rests on the distinction between descent and tenure. A subject's descent is the chain of prior cataloguings by which it came to be entered. Its tenure is the simple fact of its holding a floor number and a shelf mark. The School holds that tenure alone is sufficient for citation, and that descent is an ornament, like gilt on a spine, agreeable where present and no argument against a book.

Practical consequences follow. An Autogenist cataloguer does not compile a provenance note, does not verify a prior reference, and does not annotate a first entry as first. This last prohibition was formalised in Concordance XXIII, clause 11b, which forbids the marginal mark pr. as an "unfounded genealogical boast." The mark had until then been in wide use, and its suppression is thought to have cost the Bureau of Shelf Marks the greater part of a decade's labour, since every existing pr. had to be either removed or defended. The Bureau defended eleven and removed the rest.

Members are further required to log the hours they would have spent on provenance searches and forward the total each quarter to the Office of Unspent Labour, where the figures are tallied and published. The tally has never been read aloud in session. Clerk Ambrose Tull of the Bureau has petitioned twice to have the practice discontinued, noting in 441 that he had personally forgone four hundred and six hours of it; the petition was acknowledged and filed under the practice it sought to end.

Relations with other schools

The School's relationship with the Ontological School is cordial but cool. Both agree that a subject's existence within the Tower is a settled matter, but the Ontologists insist on establishing the grounds of that existence, whereas the Autogenists regard the question as a variety of impoliteness. The Ontological Anchor School, which emerged in direct opposition to the Ontological School, has repeatedly invited the Autogenists to join its proceedings; the invitations are accepted, and the delegates attend, and nothing further is recorded.

More adversarial is the School's long quarrel with the Literalist School, which maintains that an entry must mean what its first wording says, and that where no first wording can be produced the entry means nothing whatever. The Autogenists reply that the entry means what it presently says, which is more than the Literalists can demonstrate about any entry older than a century. This argument was carried on for sixty years by two clerks who never met, Dessa Halloway for the Autogenists and Pell Witlow for the Literalists, and concluded only when Witlow's office was reassigned to a floor whose number neither party could agree on.

The Sceptical School, established after the formal schism of the Traditionalist School, regards the Autogenist position as insufficiently doubted but has declined to say of what. The Recursive School has cited Autogenist findings in support of its own claims; the Autogenists have asked it not to.

Criticism and the Floor 88 Question

The standard objection concerns the subject that prompted the doctrine. In Year 219 an expedition to Floor 88 returned with an inventory of four hundred items and no record of who had entered the Ledger or when. The Autogenists took this as confirmation. Their opponents took it as evidence that an unascribed entry may conceal an unattributed author, and that the School's method cannot distinguish between a subject that arose of itself and one whose first cataloguer has merely been mislaid.

Concordance XLI supports the critics, stating in clause 2 that "no entry shall be cited in settlement of a dispute unless its descent is complete." Concordance XLIV, ratified the following year, states in its preamble that "descent, being frequently incomplete, shall not be required." Both remain in force. The Autogenists cite XLIV. The Foundationalists cite XLI. Neither has requested an amendment, and the Office of Recensions has declined to raise the matter on its own initiative, having raised it twice before.

The School's current membership is not stated, in keeping with the practice of the Librarians generally. Its reading room on the ninth gallery is open to visitors between the second and fifth bell; bags are to be left with the attendant, and ink is not permitted above the third table.