Concordance Prime

Concordance Prime is the official designation for the original manuscript of the Concordance of Acquisition, held under seal in the eastern alcove of Scriptorium Prime on Floor 301. It is the oldest continuously amended document in the Tower and the only one whose amendments are issued by a body — Scriptorium Prime — that is itself governed by the document it amends. This arrangement has been described by the Office of the Librarian-Prime as "recursive but settled" (Marginalia to Concordance Prime, fol. 2r) and by everyone else as the reason nothing on Floor 301 can be resolved in under a season.

Concordance Prime is not to be confused with the Third Concordance, which merely controls access to the room in which Concordance Prime is kept. The distinction is enforced by Clause 42 of the latter and misunderstood by nearly every visitor.

Physical description

The manuscript comprises one hundred and forty-one leaves of Crystal Codex, of which ninety-four are original and the remainder are insertions of varying legitimacy. The original ninety-four were inscribed with the Prime Stylus and are legible only under the raking light prescribed in Annex 2. Internal measurements are given in Prime Metres; the margin is precisely two Prime Centimetres, a figure that has not changed since the Third Revision and which the Master Orthographic Table treats as normative for all marginal work in the Tower.

The binding is later than the text by an unknown interval. A note in the Log of Initializations, entry 4,112, records that the binding was replaced "for reasons of damp" and that the previous binding was not retained. No Librarian has ever been censured for this, though several have been asked about it.

Amendments and the amendment of amendments

Amendments to Concordance Prime are issued by Scriptorium Prime alone. Each amendment is entered in the Log of Initializations, notarized, and — where the amendment concerns documentary practice — transcribed into the standing text of Title I Prime held under glass in the eastern alcove. An amendment that concerns something else is transcribed nowhere and must be remembered.

This distinction produced the Silence Edicts: amendments issued between the years 1,208 and 1,214 that concerned documentary practice in a manner Scriptorium Prime declined to specify, and which were therefore neither transcribed nor permitted to be quoted. The Edicts remain in force. The Librarian-Prime Anselm the Damp observed in his fourth survey that "a rule that cannot be quoted is a rule that can only be obeyed or broken, and the Tower has never been short of either" (Survey of the Eastern Alcove, § 19).

"Where an amendment concerns the manner of writing, it shall be written. Where it concerns the manner of not writing, it shall not."

— Silence Edicts, preamble

The recension dispute

Scholarly agreement on Concordance Prime ends at its title. The received position, maintained by Scriptorium Prime and cited in every catalogue issued since the Fifth Revision, holds that Title I Prime is a faithful recension of Annex 9 and that the two texts differ only in punctuation. The minority position, associated with Surveyor-Prime Elara Vance and pursued with some heat against her rival Surveyor-Prime Althea, holds that Annex 9 was recensioned from Title I Prime and not the reverse — that the alcove text is the elder and the Annex a later abridgement.

The dispute turns on a single reading. Title I Prime, fol. 11v, gives the operative verb as shall be entered; Annex 9 gives shall be entered, where possible. Vance argued that no recension adds a qualification of that kind to an elder text, and that the qualifying phrase was plainly inserted by a hand wishing to soften an absolute rule. Althea replied, in a memorandum of two lines, that the Tower had never lacked hands wishing to soften absolute rules, and that Vance's argument proved only that someone had. The memorandum is preserved. The question is not.

Access and incidents

Access to the alcove is controlled by Clause 42 of the Third Concordance and requires a countersigned affidavit sworn before Scriptorium Prime. In the winter of the year 1,187 a party of eleven inscribers entered the alcove on a single affidavit, the second page of which had been countersigned twice and the first not at all. The resulting Inquiry of Floor 301 established that the countersignature of a second page is not a substitute for the countersignature of a first, and that no number of inscribers may enter on one affidavit. Both findings were entered as amendments. Both were later found to contradict Annex 6, which permits "a party of suitable size" without defining suitable.

The Class Γ-Prime designation, applied to documents whose status depends on their own procedural history, was coined with Concordance Prime specifically in mind and has since been extended to thirty-one further holdings.

Relation to the Concordance of Acquisition

The Concordance of Acquisition is the body of rule by which the Tower acquires what it catalogues. Concordance Prime is its original manuscript, but not its current authority: the current authority is the standing text in the alcove, which diverges from the Prime in at least nine places, four of them substantive. The divergence is not an error. It is the means by which the Tower has acquired, over centuries, the only thing it has ever needed to acquire — an older version of itself, kept under glass, that may be cited against the newer.

LLAS-001 records the progressive illegibility of folios 1 through 30 of the Prime under repeated raking light. The Fade has been measured at a rate of one half-line per decade. At the present rate, the opening of Concordance Prime will be unreadable in the year 2,340, by which time — Scriptorium Prime has confirmed — the standing text will have superseded it entirely, and the manuscript will be retained as an object of record rather than a text.

Visitors are reminded that the alcove is not heated in the winter months and that the countersignature of a second page is not a substitute for the countersignature of a first.