Concordance 3.18.2

Concordance 3.18.2 is a subordinate instrument of the Third Concordance, promulgated in the ninth recension of the Annex VII schedule and presently the most frequently cited clause in the Tower on the subject of accidental precedence. It is short — eleven lines in the standard fair copy — and its brevity is the source of nearly everything that has happened to it since.

The clause reads, in full: "Where two instruments take effect upon the same floor in the same hour, the earlier shall be read as the later, and the later as though it had not been issued." It has been amended four times, annotated in the margins of at least nine hundred working copies, and reconciled — largely without success — in Concordance Reconciliation, which first attempted the task in the winter of Y54315412 and has not formally closed it.

Origin and the Verso Hearing

Concordance 3.18.2 was drafted to resolve the Verso Hearing, a dispute arising on a floor whose number the record gives inconsistently as 2,410 and 4,210, between two registrars who had each sealed a floor-name writ at the eleventh hour. Neither writ was defective. Both were entered. For six days the floor answered to two names and refused to answer to either.

The hearing's clerk, a junior registrar named Halvenne Ost, proposed that the second writ be treated as having been issued before the first, on the reasoning that "in the ledger, order is a courtesy and not a fact" — a phrase later struck from the record by the Concordance Amendment Tracking office but preserved in the hearing's private minutes, and now quoted in nearly every commentary on the clause.

The Third Concordance adopted Ost's proposal almost as written. Ost was not credited. This is conventional.

The fourth amendment

The clause's fourth amendment, appended under Concordance Update Y54315445, inserted the word "read" where the original had said "held." The drafting office justified the change on the grounds that instruments are held by floors but read by clerks, and that the clause had always been about the clerks. This is disputed. The Concordance Zero school holds that the emendation reversed the clause's meaning entirely and that every application of 3.18.2 between its third and fourth amendments should be regarded as void; the school has produced sixty pages of argument and no list of the affected applications.

What is undisputed is the practical consequence. After Y54315445, a clerk invoking 3.18.2 must state aloud which instrument they are reading as the later, and must do so before opening the file. The Quill of Concordance station on the relevant landing keeps a tally of these statements; it stood at 14,206 in the last published count.

Contradiction with Concordance 3.19

Concordance 3.19, issued five days after 3.18.2 and by the same hand, provides that "where two instruments take effect upon the same floor in the same hour, the earlier shall be upheld and the later referred to the Librarians." The two clauses cannot both be applied. Both remain in force. The Librarians' standing instruction on the matter, reprinted in every working edition of the Third Concordance, is that the clerk "shall apply whichever clause the circumstances require, and shall record that the other was unavailable."

"Where the circumstances require both, apply 3.18.2 twice and do not proceed to 3.19, which is longer."

— Third Concordance, Annex VII, marginal instruction of Y54315437

Concordance 23 was superseded in its entirety by Concordance 22, but 3.18.2 survives it; the supersession expressly excluded subordinate instruments of the Third Concordance, an exclusion that some read as applying only to those instruments numbered above 3.18.5. The reading has never been tested, because no one has been willing to test it.

Floor 1,880 and the Ost grievance

The clause's most famous misapplication occurred on floor 1,880 in the winter of Y54315439, when two floor-name writs took effect within the same hour and a relief clerk named Serrin Vale applied 3.18.2 to both writs simultaneously. Under the clause, the earlier became the later and the later became as though it had not been issued; applied to both, the floor briefly had no name at all. Correspondence to floor 1,880 was returned unopened for nineteen days. Vale's report of the incident is a single sentence and is filed under the floor's numeric designation, since the name was unavailable.

The grievance attached to that filing — lodged by Ost's granddaughter, a copying clerk — argues that 3.18.2 has been applied four thousand and thirty-one times without a single application attributable to its author. It requests the insertion of Ost's name in the clause's title, or failing that, a footnote. The request remains under consideration by the Fifteenth Concordance drafting office, which is not the correct office, and has said so twice.

Textual notes and citation practice

Three recensions of 3.18.2 circulate. The fair copy reads "as though it had not been issued"; a widely used abridgement reads "as though it were not issued"; a scribal error preserved in one scriptorium's holdings reads "as though it had not been used." The third has been treated as authoritative by two floors for over a century and is not to be corrected in their presence.

Clerks citing the clause are asked to give floor and hour together, as "3.18.2, floor 1,880, eighth hour," since a citation of the clause alone has been held insufficient by Concordance IX. The clause's final line — "and this shall be entered at once" — is the only part of it never amended. It is also the part most often ignored.