Concordance 417 Annex C

Concordance 417, Annex C is the third and shortest-lived annex to Concordance 417, a document otherwise concerned with the registration of vertical distances. Annex C governs the procedure by which a named floor may be temporarily reassigned a name it has not previously held, a proceeding known in the annex's own language as revision of the descriptive register. It was drafted in the winter of the year the Tower records as 6,204, entered force eleven days later, and was suspended by its own terms after four months and two days. It has not been repealed.

Origins

Concordance 417 was assembled by the Office of Vertical Records following a dispute on Floor 1,188 over whether a stairwell counted as one floor or as two. The dispute was settled in favour of the stairwell counting as one, on the ground that it possessed a single landing, and the ruling was entered as Annex B. Annex C was appended shortly afterwards at the request of the Registrar of Descriptive Names, who had observed that the same dispute would recur on any floor whose name no longer described it. The annex therefore proposed that floor names be treated as provisional and revisable on application.

Its preamble states the principle plainly: "A name is a description entered in a register, and a register that cannot be corrected is a list." — Concordance 417, Annex C, Preamble.

Procedure

Under Annex C, any floor could apply for revision of its descriptive register by petition of not fewer than nine residents, countersigned by the Warden of the Floor and forwarded to the Office of Vertical Records for entry. The petition was required to state the floor's existing name, the proposed name, and a short account of why the existing name had ceased to be accurate. No fee was charged, but petitions were accepted only between the second and sixth hours after the morning bell, a restriction the annex justified on the ground that "the register is read in the morning and written in the morning, and to write it at any other hour invites confusion." — Concordance 417, Annex C, Clause 4.

The annex also provided that a revised name would take effect only after the next full circuit of the Elevator Ledger, a register of some 40,000 entries, which in practice meant between nine and fourteen months. Revision was thus possible, but never prompt. The Registrar considered this a feature and said so in a memorandum of 6,204: "A name that can be changed by Tuesday is not a name." — Registrar of Descriptive Names, Memorandum 88.

The Floor 1,912 Incident

Annex C's reputation rests almost entirely on a single case. In the spring of 6,205, the residents of Floor 1,912 petitioned to have the floor renamed from The Hall of Small Lamps to The Hall of Lamps Recently Extinguished, on the ground that the lamps had gone out and the name had become an inaccuracy. The petition was properly made, properly countersigned, and properly entered.

The difficulty arose when the Office of Vertical Records attempted to apply the revision and discovered that, in the nine months since the petition, the lamps had been relit. The floor now had two names, both accurate, neither current. A second petition was submitted to restore the original name, which was refused on the ground that Annex C permitted revision but not reversion. The floor's ledger entry for the period reads, in its entirety: Pending.

Disagreement among the Concordances

Whether Annex C was ever lawfully in force is disputed. Its text asserts that it "derives its authority from the Third Concordance, Annex VII," but the Third Concordance, Annex VII concerns the widths of landings and makes no mention of names. The Seventh Concordance, Annex Q is sometimes cited in Annex C's favour, on the strength of its general confirmation of Lateral Annexes, but Q's scope was later defined to exclude "matters of descriptive register" — Seventh Concordance, Annex Q, Clause 19. The Fourteenth Concordance, Annex Omega does not address the annex directly, though it partially supplanted Concordance Four, which several commentators insist is a different instrument altogether.

The prevailing view in the Office of Concordance Review is that Annex C was a valid exercise of the Registrar's office that lapsed when the office itself was reorganised in 6,205, taking the annex's operative clauses with it. A minority view holds that the annex remained in force and was merely unused. The dispute has not been referred to the Librarians, who have declined twice to hear it, on the ground that it is "a matter for the register."

Status

Annex C is suspended, unrepealed, and unamended. Two applications for revision were filed in the present decade; both were returned unopened. The annex is printed in the standard recension at pages 2,118–2,121, immediately after Annex B and before the marginal note that reads, in the Registrar's hand, "sufficient." — Office of Vertical Records, Recension 9.