Clause 5 Document

The Clause 5 Document is a single-sheet instrument, held in the reading room of Floor 1,411 and produced on request no more than once per quarter, whose entire text consists of the words "Clause 5 applies." It bears no seal, no recension mark, and no date. Its authority is nonetheless treated as settled throughout the Tower, on the grounds that it has never once been challenged successfully.

Scholars distinguish the Clause 5 Document sharply from Clause 5, a wholly unrelated holding with which it is frequently confused by junior cataloguers. The Document does not describe anything. It asserts application and stops. Clause 2 is understood to govern its reading hours, though the Proviso has never been cited in the Document itself.

Physical description and custody

The Document measures 21 by 29 centimetres and is written in a single unbroken hand. The leaf is foxed along the lower edge, where a former custodian is recorded to have rested a cup of stairwell tea upon it in the winter of the year the heating on 1,411 failed. Custody passes by countersignature between two Librarians, neither of whom may read the Document aloud in the same room as the other. This prohibition was introduced by Clause 22 after an incident in which two custodians read the clause simultaneously and the resulting dispute occupied the Office of Recensions for eleven years.

Origins and the question of drafting

No recension names a drafter. The earliest inventory that lists the Document is the Third Concordance, Clause 19, which enters it among "instruments of application whose subjects are elsewhere recorded." That phrase has driven the whole subsequent literature. If the subject of Clause 5 is elsewhere recorded, the Document is a procedural instrument; if it is not, the Document is a document about nothing, and must be filed among the null holdings, of which the Tower maintains a considerable and growing number.

The Guild of Marginal Recorders has argued since at least the tenure of Archivist Vellum Fen that the Document is self-applying, and that the Clause 5 it invokes is the Document itself. The Guild's position, stated in its submission of the fourth quarter to the Ninth Concordance commissioners, is that "the Document closes upon itself as a clasp closes, and asks nothing of the reader but assent" (Guild Submission 2,209, fol. 14). The Office of Recensions has never ruled on the submission, and is not expected to.

Conflict among the Concordances

The Document's standing is complicated by the fact that the Third Concordance and the Seventh Concordance disagree about instruments of bare application. Clause 881.09 requires every instrument of application to identify its annex "in the margin, in ink of a different hand." The Clause 5 Document has no margin to speak of and no annex. Clause 4 supplies the counter-argument, holding that instruments predating the annex requirement are exempt from it — but the Document is undated, so no one can establish whether it predates anything.

A proposed amendment, Clause 4, was drafted specifically to resolve the difficulty by making the annex requirement apply to itself, thereby collapsing the distinction. It has repeatedly collided with Clause XV.11 and has not been ratified. Readers wishing to follow the dispute are directed to Clausal Coherence, which treats it at length and, by its own admission, inconclusively.

"Where an instrument names no subject, the reader is the subject, and the reading is the application."

— Clause 1.α.1, second recension

The Stammering Incident of Floor 1,411

In the winter of the heating failure, a visiting enquirer named Orris Vane requested the Document under the standing quarterly provision and, on receiving it, asked the custodian which Clause 5 was meant. The custodian replied that this was not a question the room was equipped to answer. Vane asked again at each of the four subsequent quarterly readings, and by the fourth the custodian had begun to stammer on the words "Clause 5" themselves, a condition the Lachrymalist School later catalogued as an occupational effect of repeated application without subject.

The stammer was treated, unsuccessfully, by reading the Document in the presence of a witness. It resolved only when Vane was transferred to the Forty-Eighth Concordance desk, where, as he recorded in his service note, "nothing applies to anything and the throat is at rest" (Service Note 4,412, Vane). The room's custodian now reads the Document silently and does not answer questions during the reading.

Cataloguing practice

The Document is shelved under the class of instruments of application, subshelf 5, which is empty apart from itself. Cataloguers are instructed to enter it without annotation. The instruction is widely ignored, and the current catalogue card carries fourteen lines of marginal comment in three hands, one of which reads only: "See also Determination 44, which does not help."

The Meta Textual Artifact registry has twice requested the Document for comparison and has twice been refused, on the ground that the Document cannot leave 1,411 without ceasing to apply. What it would apply to elsewhere is not discussed. Visitors may bring a pencil but not a pen, and the tea is no longer permitted in the reading room.