Concordance Juxtaposition

Concordance Juxtaposition is the practice of placing two or more Concordances, or portions of Concordances, side by side for comparison without prior arrangement under Clause 3 Comparative Juxtaposition. It is distinct from the Clause 3 practice in that it is not governed by any clause, was never authorized by the Librarians, and is performed chiefly by clerks who have run out of shelf.

The practice is old, informal, and — by the reckoning of the Concordance Amendment Tracking office — technically unauthorized in every instance since 4th-cycle 12. It persists because the Tower has never found a means of prohibiting it that did not also prohibit the shelving of books.

Origin and the Shelf Question

Concordance Juxtaposition arose on Floor 268 in the winter of 4th-cycle 12, during the recopying of the Third Concordance into what would later become the Twelfth Concordance. The copying station on that floor had been allotted nine feet of shelving and required eleven. A junior copyist, whose name survives in the floor register only as Clerk 41, is recorded as having set the Third Concordance and the draft Twelfth side by side on the same lectern so that a single candle might serve both.

The arrangement was intended to last an evening. It lasted four years. When the Warden of Perilous Folios attempted to separate the volumes in 4th-cycle 16, the resulting disturbance required a Concordance Reconciliation and the loss of an entire morning's light.

"The two documents, having been set beside one another, declined to be set apart. No clause of either governed the matter, and none was found that might have."

— Concordance 3, Annex on Unshelved Materials, note 12

The Lectern of Floor 268 remains in place and is considered, by long usage, to be occupied. It has not been dusted since 4th-cycle 19, on the grounds that dusting would require moving one of the volumes.

Relation to Clause 3 Comparative Juxtaposition

Clause 3 Comparative Juxtaposition governs the arrangement of suspect or conflicting entries prior to formal evaluation, and its provisions are read into the Twelfth Concordance verbatim. Concordance Juxtaposition concerns documents rather than entries, is performed by shelf pressure rather than by clause, and produces no Comparative Matrix. The two are frequently confused, chiefly by clerks who have read one and shelved the other.

The distinction matters in filing. Where a MR-7 form is required for the incidental adjacency of two holdings, no corresponding form exists for the adjacent shelving of two Concordances; the Third Concordance, Annex VII was amended in 4th-cycle 31 to supply one, but the amendment was itself juxtaposed against a later recension and became unreadable. Concordance Amendment Tracking records the form as proposed, drafted, and shelved.

Whether the practice feeds the Comparative Synthesis procedure is disputed. The 227th Amendment to the Twelfth Concordance defines Comparative Synthesis as the systematic juxtaposition and evaluation of contradictory spatial data, which the supporters of Concordance Juxtaposition read as licence. The Fifteenth Concordance reads it otherwise.

The Spill of Floor 749

The most cited instance of the practice occurred in 4th-cycle 44, when the shelving on Floor 749 gave way under the accumulated weight of the Seventh Concordance and the Concordance IX. The volumes fell open across one another, and a reader at the adjoining desk — one Anselm Vey, then between appointments — transcribed 200 words of the boundary before the Warden's staff arrived, on the understanding that he was reading a single document. The words have since been found in neither Concordance in that order.

Vey was fined and reassigned. The transcribed passage was filed unread, and 40 years later was cited in a dispute over stairwell Juxtaposition between Floors 451 and 450.5. The dispute is unresolved; the passage is quoted in both parties' submissions.

Scholarly Disagreement

The principal dispute concerns direction. The Twenty-Second Concordance holds that in any side-by-side arrangement the document to the left of the reader governs, and cites the Floor 268 case in support, on the grounds that the Third Concordance stood to the candle's left and its wording prevailed into the Twelfth. The Concordance 892 disagrees, holding that precedence belongs to whichever document is met first by a reader ascending the stair, which on Floor 268 is the Twelfth and reverses the result entirely.

A third position, recorded in the Concordance 23, treats the question as an artifact of where readers stand, and declines to decide it. The position has never been adopted in a ruling. It is, however, popular on Floor 268.

The Concordance Zero is never juxtaposed. Shelf registers on four separate floors note the prohibition in nearly identical wording, and no Concordance has been found that states it. Shelving on every floor is arranged so that no volume of the Zero is within a reader's reach of the floor's ends. Readers are asked to return the Zero to the desk by the stair, not the shelf.