Concordance VII-b

Concordance VII-b is the subsidiary recension of Concordance VII, issued to reconcile that document's seventh recension with the residual schedules inherited from its sixth. It is not, despite persistent misreading, an amendment. Librarians distinguish the two by the colour of the stitching: amendments are bound in red thread, subsidiary recensions in undyed linen. Concordance VII-b runs to forty-one leaves and is stored on Floor 1188, in the Aperture of Revised Instruments, where the humidity is held at forty-two parts.

The document is chiefly remembered for a single sentence. Concordance VII-b, Clause 1, provides that "the provisions of the parent Concordance shall apply in full, save where they cannot, and in such places the present recension shall be read as though the parent had said what it ought to have said." This formulation has generated more annotation than the rest of the document combined.

Origin and the Grievance of Clerk Ambrin

Concordance VII-b was drafted in the winter of the year recorded as 4,112 by the internal reckoning of the Department of Self-Aware Archives, following a dispute between two scriptoria over the correct procedure for filing returns under Concordance VII, Annex δ. The Archives of Incontestable Fact accepted returns in one order of leaves; the Office of Coincidental Alignment filed them in another. For nineteen months neither office would concede, and returns accumulated in the corridor between them to a depth of roughly one and a half cubits.

The matter was resolved by a junior clerk, Ambrin of the Fourth Stair, who observed that both offices were correct and had merely been reading different recensions. Her memorandum on the subject was three paragraphs long and is preserved in the Third Concordance, Annex VII register. The Librarians adopted her reasoning wholesale and then, as is customary, declined to name her in the resulting document. Ambrin's later petition for a supplementary stipend was refused on the grounds that the record did not establish her authorship; she is understood to have appended a note to her own copy reading "I was there." The note survives.

Relation to the Parent Concordance

The status of Concordance VII-b relative to Concordance VII remains a live question. The Eleventh Concordance, Clause VII treats subsidiary recensions as superseded on the day of their issue, which would render Concordance VII-b void since 4,112. Against this, the Seventeenth Concordance, Clause VII refers to Concordance VII-b by name in the schedule of documents still in force, and Clause 17(vii) of the Third Concordance presumes its operation in matters of containment.

The most defensible position, and the one taken by the Vellum Original of Clause VII as annotated in the margin, is that Concordance VII-b governs only those matters the parent Concordance left genuinely undetermined, and that the two documents must therefore be read together, in order, aloud, in the presence of a witness. Practice on this last point varies by floor. A witness is not required below Floor 400.

Clause 1 and the Doctrine of What Ought to Have Been Said

Clause 1 of Concordance VII-b has been cited in at least two hundred rulings. Its difficulty is that it authorises a reader to substitute an ideal text for the actual one without specifying who is competent to determine the ideal. In 4,187 the Gallery of Superfluous Marks invoked the clause to justify striking a mark from a returned instrument on the grounds that the parent Concordance clearly intended the instrument to bear no such mark. The Office of Coincidental Alignment objected that the mark in question was the only thing connecting the instrument to its owner.

"The substitution of intention for inscription is permitted only where the inscription is itself in doubt. Here the inscription was not in doubt. It was the intention that had wandered."

— Third Concordance, Clause VII, ruling of 4,187

The ruling did not resolve the question so much as postpone it. Concordance VII-b has not been amended since, though it has been annotated forty-three times, and the annotations now exceed the text by a factor of nine.

Physical Description and Handling

The fair copy of Concordance VII-b is held in the Aperture of Revised Instruments, shelf 6, position 2, beneath a lead weight. The weight was added in 4,203 after a draught carried the document into the stairwell, where it was recovered eleven floors down by a party from the Treatise on Unmade Things Vol Vii reading room. The party returned it promptly. A note in the accession register records that they had mistaken it for something else and were disappointed.

Readers wishing to consult Concordance VII-b must apply in writing to the Aperture. The document may be read on the premises. It may not be copied, transcribed, or summarised on the premises, on the grounds that the summarisers previously employed for this purpose were found to be producing documents that were themselves summarised. The practice was discontinued in 4,231 and the summarisers were reassigned to the Annex VII of the Ninth Concordance revision, where their work has not been reviewed.

Later Recensions and the Rival Text

A second recension, designated Concordance VII-b(ii), was drafted in 4,260 and never ratified. It differs from the first by the insertion of a single comma in Clause 1, placed after the word "full." Three readings have been proposed for the comma, and the Third Concordance, Annex VII records that all three have been adopted by different offices at different times without any office conceding that it had changed position. The comma has been the subject of a correspondence lasting sixty-one years between the Aperture and the Department, which the Department has twice declared closed and twice reopened.

Concordance VII-b(ii) is not to be confused with the Rival Concordance, a separate document of unknown provenance whose relationship to Concordance VII is discussed at Third Concordance, Annex VII. Some Librarians have argued that the comma was inserted by the same hand that produced the Rival text. The argument rests on the slant of the stroke and is not accepted in the Aperture. The comma itself is not on public view.