Class B

Class B is the designation applied within the Tower to holdings whose contents are correct but whose filing is in dispute. Unlike Class A, which governs matters of hierarchical primacy, or Class Alpha, which triggers juridical review upon deposit, Class B does not concern itself with what a document says. It concerns only where the document is kept, and whether that place is the place the document believes itself to be in.

The class was established under Fourth Concordance, Annex 11, following the discovery that a substantial portion of the archive's holdings had been shelved correctly by accident and could not thereafter be moved without falsifying their own citations. The Annex is four sentences long and has been amended nineteen times.

Definition and scope

A holding enters Class B when two conditions obtain: the holding's internal references match its physical location, and that location contradicts every external index of the floor. The classical example is the Winter Recension of the Ledger of Floor 88, which cites itself at Floor 88 and has been shelved at Floor 41 since at least 1140. Both citations are correct. The Recension is not duplicated; it is simply at Floor 41 in a manner that Floor 88 continues to regard as a temporary arrangement.

Class B holdings are marked with a small blue diamond stamped at the lower left of the spine, in accordance with the Second Concordance on Spine Markings, clause 9(b). The stamp is applied by a Clerk-Arkivist Second Class and countersigned by a Clerk-Arkivist Second Class. Readers have noted the apparent redundancy; the Bureau of Spine Markings has declined to address it in writing.

The 1347 displacement

In the winter of 1347, a routine reshelving on Floor 212 returned four hundred and six Class B holdings to their nominal floors. Within a fortnight, every one of them had been rediscovered on Floor 212, some of them carried back by clerks who insisted they had never moved them. The episode is recorded in the Memorandum of the Fourth Underscribe as "a correction that the archive declined to accept."

"Let it be entered that the shelves of 212 are correct and the documents are correct and no further inquiry is to be made into the matter by any party."

— Memorandum of the Fourth Underscribe, entry 6

The Memorandum has since been cited in no fewer than forty-one Class B disputes, chiefly for the phrase "no further inquiry," which subsequent clerks have interpreted variously as a prohibition, a deferral, and a description of the weather. The underscribe in question, Underscribe Halven Marrow, is not recorded as having written anything else.

Relation to other classes

Class B is frequently confused with Class Beta, which concerns holdings that emit light and is distinguished from Class B by the fact that Class Beta holdings can be found. The confusion is aggravated by the Class Beta Unbound Attribute, a stamp applied to Class D holdings that originated in Beta-class logs, and which resembles the Class B diamond closely enough that the Office of Stamps and Seals issued a correction in 1202. The correction was itself misfiled as a Class B holding and remains on Floor 41.

A holding may be Class B and Ontological Class 7-B simultaneously. Where this occurs, the file is maintained under 7-B and the blue diamond is stamped over the class numeral, which the Office of Stamps and Seals describes as "intentional." Class B does not participate in the recursive description requirements of Sigma-class descent operations; the Fifth Concordance, Annex 2, is explicit that a document cannot be recursively misplaced, only misplaced repeatedly.

Scholarly dispute

The central disagreement concerns whether Class B is a class of documents or a class of shelves. The Seventeenth Concordance holds the former position: a document is Class B by nature, and would remain so if moved to any floor. The Nineteenth Concordance, Annex 6, holds the latter: the shelf is Class B, and any document placed upon it inherits the designation, whether or not it wishes to.

The dispute is not academic. Under the Seventeenth reading, the four hundred and six holdings of the 1347 displacement remain Class B wherever they sit. Under the Nineteenth, Floor 212 itself is now a Class B floor, a status the floor's custodial clerk has disputed since 1348 on the grounds that no one consulted the floor. The Bureau of Floor Status has ruled twice, in opposite directions, and has since referred all further Class B questions to the Concordance Revisory Committee, which has not met since 1391.

Handling

Class B holdings may be consulted in the ordinary way. They may not be reshelved. A reader who removes one must return it to the shelf from which it was taken, even if that shelf is incorrect, and must sign the Displacement Register with the floor number of the shelf and not the floor number printed on the document. Clerks are asked not to explain this to readers unless asked twice.

The blue diamond is renewed every eleven years. Holdings whose diamonds have faded are not Class B until restamped, a lapse that has quietly emptied the class and refilled it three times in the present century. The Office of Stamps and Seals maintains that the class is stable. The evidence of the shelves is otherwise, but the shelves do not write.