Conditional Annexation

Conditional Annexation is the provisional incorporation of a contiguous or proximate space into the holdings of the Tower, effective only for so long as a stated condition obtains. It is distinguished from ordinary Annexation by the presence of a condition clause, and from Conditional Authority by the fact that the space is, during the term of the condition, genuinely held: surveyed, shelved, staffed and lit. When the condition lapses, the space is not demolished but returned — a procedure no one has ever satisfactorily described, since the returned space is not restored to its prior state but to a state the archive records as "prior, as amended."

The practice is governed principally by Annex A, stages three and five, and by the Vell Doctrine, which requires that the condition be capable of determination by a single clerk without consultation. In practice this requirement has never been met. Clerks of the Conditional Tense maintain that a condition determined by one clerk is thereafter the property of that clerk's memory, and that the memory of a clerk is not an instrument of survey.

Origin and the Third Concordance

The procedure is conventionally dated to the Third Concordance, Annex 2, clause 14, which provided for the annexation of the north stair headland "for so long as the stair shall be in use." The clause was drafted to settle a dispute over corridor width and was not expected to bind anything. The stair remained in use for four hundred and six years. Its disuse, when it came, produced the first recorded return, and the return produced the first recorded dispute about whether a returned space counts against the archive's total holdings.

The Concordance did not answer this. A subsequent recension, the Third Concordance, Second Recension of T.C. 6,118, appended a note in a different hand reading only "the headland is a case of itself." This note has been cited in every conditional case since and has never been construed.

Conditions held to be determinable

The Vell Doctrine's test — determinable by a single clerk without consultation — has generated a modest body of rulings. Conditions of presence ("while the lamp is lit," "while the sexton remains"), conditions of season, and conditions of sound (the Ordinance of Conditional Closure Occ 8812 admits a bell as an instrument of determination) have all been upheld. Conditions of opinion, of custom, and of general repute have all failed.

The celebrated failure is the annexation of the East Lightwell under condition "while it is needed," held void in T.C. 9,332 on the ground that need is determined by the party who asserts it and is therefore not a condition but a preference. The Bureau of Annexation has never accepted this ruling and continues to file East Lightwell papers under a live shelf-mark, in a drawer labelled "Needed." Visitors are asked not to open it.

The Nine-Day Gallery

The most cited modern case is the Nine-Day Gallery on floor 3,114, conditionally annexed in the winter of T.C. 12,409 under the condition that a named clerk remain stationed within it. The clerk, Odren Vasp, remained. The condition did not require him to be awake, and after the fourth winter he was not reliably so, and the gallery's holdings drifted by some eleven shelf-feet in a direction no surveyor could account for.

The matter was resolved not by ruling but by the Bureau of Annexation issuing a clarification under Annex B, which had been kept in a chained binding since the Parchment Vaults Annexation and was opened for the occasion at a cost of two seals and a morning. Annex B distinguishes the station of a clerk from the attention of a clerk, and holds that a condition requiring station is satisfied by a chair. Vasp's chair is preserved in the gallery and is listed in the inventory as occupied.

Relationship to Lateral Annexation

Conditional Annexation differs from Lateral Annexation in that lateral work integrates interstitial space, which is space the archive already surrounds, whereas conditional work takes space the archive does not yet surround and holds it at arm's length. The Western Annexation Accords, instruments three and five, treat the two as a single class for purposes of sealing, which has caused persistent friction with the Survey. The practical difficulty is that a laterally annexed stairwell has no return clause and a conditionally annexed one has nothing else.

A body of opinion, associated with the Survey of Proximate Spaces, holds that all conditional annexations are lateral annexations whose condition has not yet lapsed, and that the distinction is one of patience rather than of kind. The Bureau of Annexation has declined to comment in writing on four occasions, which is itself recorded as a position.

Record-keeping

Conditional holdings are entered in the Register of Provisional Holdings in red ink, and on the lapse of the condition the entry is struck through rather than removed, so that the register thickens at the rate of its own corrections. The red ink is prepared on floor 2,908 and is not permitted to leave that floor in any quantity exceeding one dram.

"A condition is not a promise. It is a fence with a date on it."

— Vell Doctrine, marginal note to clause 7

Disputes over conditional holdings are heard by the Assizes of Proximate Space in alternate years, and in the intervening years by whoever is on the floor. This arrangement was described in the Manual of Conditional Operation as "tolerable," a word that has since been amended twice.