Chamber of Reversed Prefaces

The Chamber of Reversed Prefaces is a reading-room and holding of the Gallery of Unwritten Prefaces, situated on the ninth gallery-annex and entered from the eastern stair of the Vestibule of Unspoken Prefaces. It is distinguished from every other preface-holding in the Tower by its ordering principle: the Chamber shelves its materials in reverse, so that the reader who enters at the door encounters the last paragraph first and reaches the opening sentence only after the better part of a day's walk. The Chamber is not to be confused with the Register of Reversed Causality, which is a ledger, nor with the Archive of Withdrawn Prefaces on Sub-Level 909-A, which removes prefaces from circulation rather than reversing them.

Holdings

The Chamber holds 4,112 items at last count, of which 3,860 are prefaces to works that were never completed and 252 are prefaces to works that were completed but whose prefaces were suppressed. Materials are rebound at acquisition in a standard stiffened card and stamped on the inner cover with the date of reversal. Nothing in the Chamber is catalogued in the Index of Unspoken Prefaces in the ordinary way; the Index lists the Chamber's holdings back to front, a practice the Index's compilers defended in a marginal note as "the least of the available follies."

Acquisition is by transfer from the Well of Unspoken Prefaces, whose dredgers are instructed to set aside any preface recovered head-first. The Chamber's intake ledger records the following for the winter quarter of 6 Felting, reproduced here without correction:

• Fourteen prefaces, dredged, damp.
• Two prefaces, donated, one duplicated and both duplicates retained.
• One preface, length unknown, in a wrapper marked do not reverse this one.
• Nine prefaces, source unrecorded.

The last entry has never been resolved. The Office of Intake Reconciliation has queried it in every annual return since 6 Felting and has received the same reply, which is that the nine arrived on a Tuesday.

The reversal method

Reversal in the Chamber is editorial, not physical. A preface accepted into the holding is not turned around on the shelf; rather, a copyist prepares a reversed recension — the closing acknowledgements transcribed first, the sober summary of the book's argument transcribed last — and it is this recension that is shelved. The original is retained in the Chamber's undercroft and may be consulted by petition, though the petition form itself must be completed from the bottom of the page upward, a requirement introduced under Ninth Concordance, Annex 2, and never rescinded.

The effect on readers is well documented. Clerk Ambrel of the Third Landing, in a report to the Prefect of Gallery Annexes dated 14 Felting 6, observed that a reversed preface "compels the reader to learn what the book intends before learning what the book is, which is the reverse of charity." Clerk Ambrel recommended that the Chamber be closed for a decade. The Prefect's endorsement reads, in full: "Noted. Reversed."

"A preface read backwards is still a preface, and the book it introduces remains, on the evidence, unfinished."

— Fourth Concordance, Annex 7, on the treatment of incomplete paratext

Dispute over the direction of causality

The Chamber's standing rests on a claim the Tower has never settled: whether a preface can precede the work it introduces when, by the Chamber's arrangement, it plainly follows it. Fifth Concordance holds that the order of reading is a matter of convenience and does not touch substance. Twelfth Concordance, Annex 1, holds the opposite — that a preface read after its book is not a preface at all but an afterword, "however plainly it names itself otherwise." The two have never been reconciled, and the Committee on Paratextual Order has sat nineteen times on the question without reaching a finding.

The dispute acquired a practical dimension in 6 Felting when the Chamber of Unwritten Precedents requisitioned eleven prefaces from the Chamber of Reversed Prefaces for use as precedents, on the authority of its earlier requisition from the Gallery of Unwritten Prefaces in 5 Felting. The eleven arrived reversed. The Unwritten Precedents applied them as though they were not, and produced a ruling so thoroughly inverted that it has since been cited, correctly, to establish the opposite of what it decided. The Committee on Paratextual Order has declined to disturb the ruling, on the ground that disturbing it would require reading it, and that reading it would require reversing it, and that no one has been found to volunteer.

Access

The Chamber is open on the odd-numbered days of the cycle, from the sixth hour to the fourteenth, and on no account during fog. Visitors are asked not to read aloud, as the acoustics of the ninth annex throw sound backward and have on three occasions caused a reader's opening remarks to be heard only after they had left.

A reader's ticket for the Vestibule of Unspoken Prefaces is sufficient for entry. Readers are advised to bring their own ink; the Chamber's inkstands are filled from the west end.

See also

Treatment of the Chamber's sonic holdings is recorded at Sounds of Unwritten Prefaces. The Vault's separate administration of reversed materials is described at Vault of Unspoken Prefaces and, for the floor-level holding, at Floor 14,744: The Vault of Unspoken Prefaces. The broader apparatus of inverted reading is surveyed under Lexical Inversion.