Clerk-Subprior Emery

Clerk-Subprior Emery (d. 760 S.C.) was a junior administrative officer of the Clerk-Registrar Corps whose principal contribution to Tower governance was the invention, maintenance, and eventual abandonment of the Fifth Provisional Register — an instrument intended to hold subjects too uncertain for ordinary cataloguing and which, by the time of its closure, held nothing at all.

Origins and appointment

Emery entered the service as a copyist on the Threshold stair, where he was noted for an unusual willingness to record entries that other clerks declined to certify. His promotion to subprior is recorded in the appointment ledger of the Clerk-Registrar Corps, spiral 14, folio 88, which gives the date only as "the winter after the recension." The wording is not unusual; roughly one appointment in six is similarly dated, and the Clerk-Registrar of Linear Standards has twice declined to regularise the practice.

His rank placed him beneath the Clerk Registrar proper and above the second-class archivists, among whom he counted his only documented friend, Clerk-Arkivist Second Class Ondra Vey. Their correspondence, preserved in part, is largely concerned with ink.

The Fifth Provisional Register

Prior to Emery's tenure, doubtful subjects were handled by annotation: a clerk wrote the doubtful matter in the margin and a senior officer struck it through or initialled it. Emery argued, in a submission to the Clerk of Provisional Reality, that the margins of the Tower's registers were becoming unreadable and that doubtful subjects deserved a volume of their own. The Office consented on 744 S.C., on the condition that the volume be bound in grey and shelved apart from the certified holdings.

The Fifth Provisional Register was duly bound in grey. It was shelved apart. It then sat empty for eleven years.

"The difficulty is not want of doubtful subjects. The difficulty is that a clerk who is certain enough to enter a subject in the Provisional Register is by that certainty disqualified from the Register, which receives only the genuinely uncertain. No subject has yet been uncertain for long enough to reach the shelf."

— Clerk-Registrar of Linear Standards, memorandum to the Clerk Registrar, 749 S.C.

Emery responded that the Register's emptiness was itself a finding, and proposed that the Register be catalogued as a holding. This proposal was accepted. The resulting entry listed the Fifth Provisional Register as a subject, which made the Register no longer empty, which in turn disqualified the entry by its own terms. This sequence is now taught in the Scholar Clerk curriculum as the Emery Recursion, and is the reason candidates are examined on it twice: once in the third year, and again in the seventh, when they are expected to have forgotten their first answer.

Dispute with the Clerk of the Threshold

Emery's relations with the Clerk of the Threshold deteriorated over the winter of 752–753, when he began removing marginal annotations from older volumes and transferring them to the grey Register without copying them back. Clerk Aris, then holding the Threshold in its final century, obtained an order restraining the practice and had the removed annotations reinstated in red.

The red annotations remain. A reader consulting the registers for that period will find them doubled — once in the original hand, once in Emery's, once again in the correction — and the Clerk Registrars have ruled twice that all three are authentic. Emery's private view, recorded in a letter to Vey, was that the ruling was "generous to the second of us."

The question of the name

A persistent confusion attaches to the subject because the Adjudication Chambers were at that time presided over by Emery Solon, later Arbiter Solon, author of Ruling 4117-γ/Appellate and Chief Justice for eighteen years from 742 to 760. The two men were contemporaries, both resident in the upper service floors, and both died in 760. They were not related.

Scholars remain divided on the confusion's consequences. The Co-locationist school, following the reasoning advanced by Clerk Elara in the matter of the Clerk's Respite, holds that the shared name caused the surviving clerical and juridical records to be co-shelved, and that the Fifth Provisional Register was emptied in 762 not by ruling but by mistake during a re-shelving. The Separatist school, citing the inventory mark in the closing certificate, argues the emptying was deliberate. The certificate itself is available and reads only: Withdrawn. No claims outstanding. It is initialled, but the initials cannot be read.

Death and posthumous record

Emery died in 760, in the same season and, according to the corridor register, within nine days of Emery Solon. The coincidence prompted the only recorded instance of a Clerk-Subprior's death being announced twice, the second announcement having been prepared for the wrong notice board on the Mobile Assets landing. The duplicate was not withdrawn; it was annotated, and the annotation worn away by use.

He was not awarded the posthumous title of Arbiter, which is reserved to the Adjudication Chambers, and no petition on his behalf was made. His grey Register survives, re-bound in 801, and now contains forty-one entries, none of which may be cited.

Visitors to the grey shelf are asked to leave the volume closed.