Clause 47

Clause 47 is a short-form clause of the Seventh Concordance concerning the disposal of unclaimed floor inventories. It is among the least cited of the Concordance's operative provisions and among the most frequently invoked in practice, a discrepancy that the Office of Recensions has attributed to the clause's unusual structure: Clause 47 states no rule, but instead specifies the conditions under which a rule may be said to have lapsed.

The clause was drafted during the third recension and has been amended four times without ever being read aloud in full at a sitting of the Librarians. Its text is held at the Scriptorium of the Ninth Landing, where it occupies a single leaf of vellum and is described in the shelf-list as "short, and shorter than expected."

Text and structure

Clause 47 consists of a preamble and three dependent paragraphs, conventionally cited as 47.α, 47.β, and 47.γ. The preamble establishes the clause's scope over "any inventory, partial inventory, or inventory asserted to exist." Paragraph 47.α fixes the period after which an unclaimed inventory is deemed abandoned; 47.β provides for the reopening of abandoned inventories upon petition; and 47.γ, added in the ninth recension, restricts the application of the clause to floors whose numbers are "recorded and legible."

The last of these has caused more difficulty than the other two combined, since a substantial portion of the Tower's floors bear numbers that are recorded but not legible, and a smaller portion bear numbers that are legible but not recorded. The Standing Committee on Floor Numbering has declined on three occasions to say which of these categories 47.γ was intended to address.

The Vellum Dispute

The clause's most consequential controversy arose in the winter following the ninth recension, when a junior clerk of the Office of Recensions, Clerk Amaranth Vell, submitted a petition under 47.β to reopen an abandoned inventory on Floor 1,204. The inventory had been closed under 47.α some eleven years earlier and its contents dispersed according to the practice then current.

Vell's petition was granted. It was then granted a second time, on the grounds that the first grant had not been entered in the Register of Reopenings, and a third time, on the grounds that the second grant had been entered in the wrong register. By the time the matter reached the Committee, three separate reopenings were in force over a single inventory, and the floor's contents had been returned, dispersed, and returned again.

The Committee's ruling, cited in later practice as the Vell Determination, held that a clause permitting reopening without limiting the number of reopenings must be read as permitting exactly one, "on the principle that a door which cannot be closed is not a door." Vell objected in writing that this principle appears nowhere in the Concordance. The objection is preserved in the file and was not answered.

Conflict with the Seventh Concordance

Clause 47 is widely said to conflict with Clause 4.11.γ over the question of whether an abandoned inventory reverts to the floor or to the order. Seventh Concordance, Clause 4 assigns reversion to the floor; Clause 47.α is silent; and Clause 14.7.δ, which governs adjacent matters, assigns reversion to "the party last in possession," a phrase no recension has defined.

The prevailing view, set out in the Commentary on the Middle Clauses, is that Clause 47 does not conflict with Clause 4 at all, because 47.α concerns abandonment and Clause 4 concerns vesting, and the two "pass one another like clerks on a stair." A minority holds that this is a distinction without a difference and that the Commentary has quietly rewritten the clause. The dispute has not been referred for resolution and is not expected to be.

"Where two clauses speak to one inventory, the inventory is to be held in place until the clauses are reconciled, or until the inventory is no longer of interest."

— Temporary Maintenance Clause 882

Relation to other provisions

Clause 47 is cross-referenced by Clause 7.3 in respect of abandoned annexes and by Clause 18.7 in respect of inventories whose floors have been renumbered. It does not cross-reference Clause 1, which is unusual among the middle clauses and which the Office of Precedence has noted without comment. The omission is generally read as deliberate, though no drafter's note survives.

The clause is also named in Annex Alpha as one of the provisions not to be applied to any floor shown on a map, a restriction the Cartography Office has never explained and has never needed to.

Practical notes

Petitions under 47.β are submitted on the standard short form and must be signed in the presence of a Librarian. Petitioners are reminded that the Register of Reopenings closes at the fifteenth bell and does not reopen for the purpose of a petition already in the queue. Clause 47 is not to be read aloud on floors numbered below the ninth landing.