Chief Curator Anselm (Fifth Reiteration)

Chief Curator Anselm (Fifth Reiteration) is the designation borne by the holder of the curatorial office whose authority derives from Ruling 449-b, issued in the Year-Spiral 9,882. The parenthetical qualifier is not a numeral of rank but a count of the office's recensions: the present holder is the fifth Anselm to have occupied the curatorship under the wording of 449-b, the previous four having vacated it by death, promotion, or — in the case of the Third Reiteration — reclassification. The current Reiteration administers the curatorial seals of Floors 388 through 1,204 and is the only officer permitted to counter-sign a Provisional Holding on the same day it is opened.

Origins and Ruling 449-b

The curatorship predates its Anselms. Its earliest claim to precedence rests on an appointment dated to the founding of the Chief Curator of Spatial Anomalies, an office created by The First Concordance and foundational within the First Librarianate. When the spatial curatorship began to accumulate harmonic files it could not itself adjudicate, Ruling 449-b carved out a parallel seat for the disposition of holdings whose floor-number could not be verified on inspection. The Ruling's operative clause reads:

"A holding whose floor resists confirmation shall not be struck from the register, but shall pass to the Curator of the Fifth Reiteration, who shall answer for it as though it stood."

— Ruling 449-b, clause 3, Year-Spiral 9,882

The phrase "as though it stood" has furnished four centuries of litigation. It is the basis on which the office claims authority over holdings that have never been seen, and the basis on which its critics deny that authority.

Relationship to the Fifth Spiral

The curatorship was reorganised during the Fifth Spiral, when the Fifth Librarian held simultaneously the offices of Chief Archivist and Chief Librarian. The Fifth Spiral Consolidation absorbed the curatorial registers into the wider archival sequence, and the office's independence was thereafter qualified: appointments to the Fifth Reiteration are confirmed by the Chief Librarian, though the office itself is not answerable to that seat in matters of disposition. On questions of spatial-harmonic interference, the Curator answers instead to the Office of the Chief Curator of Spatial Anomalies, to which it remits roughly a third of its contested files each aperture. The Office of Chief Archivist retains a courtesy copy of every remittal, unopened.

The Vellin Recension

The Fourth Reiteration's register was recensioned in the winter of 1,411 by Curator Vellin, who argued that the office had drifted from its charter by confirming floors it had never descended. Vellin's recension struck 2,308 entries on the ground that they were "held in name only." The correction did not survive its own review. Clerk Anselm of the Fifth Gallery answered in the same year that entries made in spirit were sufficient without a seal, and the resulting exchange — the Vellin–Anselm Correspondence, some nine hundred folios — is still cited whenever a disposition is challenged. The Fifth Reiteration restored 1,904 of the struck entries in its first aperture of office, leaving 404 in abeyance; those 404 are still in abeyance.

Jurisdictional dispute with the Acoustic Curatorship

The office's most durable quarrel is with the Curator of Acoustic Anomalies, over floors whose number is audible but not legible. The Acoustic Curatorship maintains that a floor which announces itself cannot be said to resist confirmation, and therefore falls outside 449-b. The Fifth Reiteration maintains the contrary, on the reasoning that a number heard is not a number verified. The dispute was referred to the Concordance of Jurisdictions in 1,449 and remains under reference; both offices continue to maintain separate registers of the same eleven floors, and both registers are considered authoritative by their respective keepers.

Incidents of the office

The Third Reiteration was reclassified in 1,207 following an inspection of Floor 902, which was found to be two floors. The reclassification was subsequently reversed on appeal, the inspection having been conducted from the wrong landing. The Fourth Reiteration declined to reopen the appeal, and the floor's status remains, in the words of the register, "provisional pending a landing." Its successor has not visited Floor 902, and states that it does not intend to.

In 1,463 the office lost four days to the mislaying of its seal, which was recovered from a reading desk on Floor 723 by its Curator, Librarian Anselm, who had mistaken it for a paperweight. The seal was returned without remark; the Fourth Reiteration's instruction that seals not be left on reading desks was reissued and, by the office's own minute of 1,464, "noted."

Succession and the Reiteration question

Whether the Reiteration count runs by appointment or by confirmation is contested. The office's own register counts from the date of the seal's passing; the Librarian-Regent's roll counts from the date of confirmation by the Chief Librarian, which in three cases fell in a later Year-Spiral. The discrepancy accounts for the occasional appearance of the present holder in other records as the Fourth-and-a-half Reiteration, a designation the office does not recognise and has not corrected. The Librarian of the Fifth Order has been asked to settle the question twice; on both occasions it returned the papers with the note that the question was not before it.