Chen Amendment

The Chen Amendment is the collective designation for a body of revisions to the Provisional Logging Protocol, enacted in three recensions between 1889 and 1911 and amended in place at least eleven times thereafter. Its principal object is the mechanics of the Amendment Logging Process, and in particular the logging of amendments that contradict one another. It is not to be confused with Amendment 117.45.β, with which it is frequently collated by junior clerks, nor with the practice known as the two-clerk Chen Amendment, which is a procedure rather than a text and which the Amendment itself does not name.

Copies are held on Floor 812, the Annex of Corrections, and — in a recension of disputed authority — in the Chen Folio, whose acquisition by terminal acquisition in 842 is generally taken as the date from which the Amendment's authority is reckoned, notwithstanding that the text postdates it.

Structure and recensions

The Amendment is conventionally divided into a preamble, four clauses, and an unnumbered schedule of worked examples. The first recension (1889) ran to two clauses and a single example; the second (1897) added the schedule; the third (1911) added Clause 4, which is the clause everybody cites and nobody has read in full, and which the Nineteenth Concordance, Amendment 7 describes as "the least examined sentence in the Protocol, and the most often pleaded" (Nineteenth Concordance, Amendment 7, marginalia).

Clause 2 requires that where a submission would amend the Amendment, the amending amendment must itself be logged twice — once as an amendment and once as a submission — and the two entries must not be collated until the fortnight has elapsed. Clause 3 provides for the separation of the roles of Logger and Investigator when a Contradiction Protocol alert coincides with a submission, an arrangement now recorded separately as the two-clerk Chen Amendment. Clause 4 concerns Quarantined Catalysts and is discussed below.

Clause 4 and the Chen Discrepancy

Clause 4 governs the treatment of quarantined catalysts — substances, forms, and, in one notorious instance, a doorknob, held in suspension pending classification. As first drafted it required only that a quarantined catalyst be "logged and left"; the Chen Discrepancy of 1908 demonstrated that "left" admitted of forty-one readings, three of which resulted in catalysts being returned to circulation under the wrong floor number. The revision of 1909 replaced "left" with a table of permissible rests and durations.

"A catalyst quarantined in excess of ninety days shall be counted as part of the floor's furniture, and shall be dusted accordingly."

— Chen Amendment, Clause 4(b), as revised 1909

The Librarian-Provisional whose name the body of text carries was not, it should be said, the author of Clause 4(b); the attribution is disputed and is treated at length under Elara Chen. The second recension of the Amendment, which bears her countersignature, is silent on the point.

The two-clerk dispute

The Amendment's most contested provision is the two-clerk requirement of Clause 3. The Fifth Concordance holds, at Amendment 4, that interstitial spaces require a dedicated Chen Protocol and that the two-clerk arrangement is therefore a species of that Protocol rather than of the Amendment. The Seventh Concordance disagrees in a passage of unusual warmth, observing that "a clerk is not made two by standing in a doorway" (Seventh Concordance, Annex 2, note 6). The dispute has been referred to the Concordance Board four times, referred onward twice, and is currently before the Board a fifth time.

In practice clerks on Floor 812 follow the Amendment and clerks on the Annex follow the Fifth Concordance, which is why the same submission may be logged once or twice depending on the door through which it is carried. A visiting rule of 1893 requires that submissions be carried through the north door only; this has not been observed since the north door was sealed.

Amendment Logging and the Chen Protocol

The Amendment's standing was complicated by the Chen Protocol, whose findings — drawn from the inquiry following the Chen Discrepancy — were held to supersede the Amendment's Clause 4 while leaving the rest of it intact. The Protocol Summary records that the Amendment "survives in its remainder, if remainder there be" (The Chen Protocol Summary, §12). The Amendment's own schedule of worked examples was not formally withdrawn, and clerks continue to consult it, chiefly for Example 9, which concerns a catalyst that logged itself.

Later discrepancies have been collated against the Amendment as a matter of course, though the Amendment makes no provision for them. The practice is defended by reference to Amendment 47 and, less convincingly, to Amendment 14-f.

Textual notes

Three recensions are in circulation. The 1889 text is the shortest and is preferred by the Order of Copyists on grounds of legibility. The 1897 text includes the schedule and is the version most commonly cited. The 1911 text includes Clause 4(b) and is the only one held on Floor 812 in a fair hand. A fourth recension, alleged to have been prepared during the winter of 1903 and never sealed, is referred to in the Case of the Echoing Folio but has not been produced.

Marginal annotations in the 1911 copy are in three hands, one of which has been identified as that of Elara Vance. The annotation beside Clause 3, though much faded, appears to read "not two clerks, but two desks," a reading the Concordance Board has declined to adopt. The desks themselves were requisitioned in 1914 and have not been returned.