Cover Sheet

The Cover Sheet is the outermost folio of any bound docket in The Tower and the only leaf whose removal is permitted without annotation. In its standard form it bears the receiving office's seal, the docket's title, and a single line of particulars; the working papers beneath it are held to be neither legible nor admissible until the cover has been lifted. The class is distinguished from the The Stamped Cover Sheet and from the docketed Title Sheet by the absence of the Provisional Sigil (Ψ): a cover sheet declares nothing, and any document that requires declaration must pass upward through the Offices of Declaration and be issued a stamped cover in its place.

Cover sheets are furnished in nine weights, of which the first four are in ordinary circulation. Weight five is used for the vertical carriage of dockets exceeding four hundred leaves and is otherwise seen only in the scriptoria of Annex γ-9, where it is cut to the dimensions of the press.

Anatomy and materials

A cover sheet is a single leaf, folded once at the head and twice at the tail, giving it what the trade standards call "three creases and no corners." The stock is unbleached, of a weight between the two sheets of a Transit Manifest and the rough membrane of a Dust Cover, a range that has held steady since the Calcified Vellum Theta recension of the standards restated it at the Assay of the Ninth Landing.

Two markings are mandatory. The first is the seal of the receiving office, impressed at the lower margin and never at the head, a placement fixed by the dispute of the winter of 1387 after a clerk of the Third Landing sealed a cover at its head and the docket beneath was held, for a period of eleven days, to have no cover at all. The second is the particulars line, written in a single hand and naming only the docket's title, its floor of receipt, and the number of enclosed leaves. Clerks who add a third particular are directed to Concordance ǂ1.01, clause 14, which does not explain why and has not been amended.

Sheets are no — they are stacked face down, in tens, and left to the lamp. A sheet still warm from the scriptorium lamp may not be turned, trimmed, or disturbed; enforcement of this falls to the Wardens of the Warm Sheet, who are frequent visitors to the binding halls and are not announced.

The Conventions of Lifting

No cover sheet is lifted in silence. The rule, which belongs to the Procedures of the Quiet and is generally dated to the tenure of the then-unnamed Prefect of the Lower Counter, requires that the reader announce the lifting and the docket's number before the first leaf is turned. The Silence Rule is a separate provision and is not a substitute for it: one governs speech at a distance from an unrolled sheet, the other governs the lift itself, and the two have been confused in every generation of readers since.

Failure is not void but recorded. A docket lifted without announcement receives a marginal note in the hand of the observing under-clerk and a delay of one full rotation before it may be folded for return. The practice survives largely because the note is not read; the delays are, however, counted.

Dispute over the cover of the Gamma Manifest

The most durable disagreement in the class concerns the Gamma Manifest, whose own cover sheet is standardized to the first weight and whose particulars line is fixed by the form. A body of opinion, maintained most consistently by the correspondence clerks of the Seventh Gallery, holds that the Gamma Manifest's cover sheet belongs to the document itself and travels with it, and that a reader who removes it has assembled a second, unauthorized manifest. The contrary opinion, recorded in the annotations to Directorial Decree 447-Alpha and repeated in every recension of the Whispering Atlas Petition, holds that a cover sheet is a cover sheet and that no form may exempt itself from its own outermost leaf.

The disagreement was brought to a head by the affair of Sub Folio 112 A722, a manifest whose cover was separated, catalogued under the letter of its particulars, and thereafter filed as a document in its own right. Its opening line reads, in full: "Inquiry concerning the whereabouts of the previous inquiry." The clerks of the Seventh Gallery have declined to rule on whether the cover or the body is the manifest, and have asked for the question to be put to the Concordances, which is a way of saying it will be asked for a very long time.

Cover sheets and the question of content

A cover sheet is not a blank. The distinction, argued at length by the Scriptorium of the Ninth Landing and never quite settled, is that a blank is a leaf that carries nothing while a cover sheet carries the fact of the leaf beneath it, and that the matching of the particulars line to the enclosed docket is itself a form of text. The Conceptual Laminates school has gone further, contending that a cover sheet of weight one, applied to a docket of four hundred leaves, is a compression of that docket and might be read as its summary. The Librarians have not rejected the contention, and have not adopted it.

The practical objection is that the reader can lift a cover sheet at any time and look at the working papers beneath. No school has proposed that this is prohibited, though a note in a mid-century hand, filed with Sequencing and initialled by no one, remarks that "the lift is an act of interpretation and should be attempted only by those in a position to survive it."

Inventory of the standard cover sheet

A single leaf, in conforming order from head to tail:

• Fold at the head, pressed, unsealed.
• Docket title in the receiving clerk's hand, upper margin.
• Particulars line: title, floor of receipt, number of enclosed leaves.
• Seal of the receiving office, lower margin, never the head.
• Folds at the tail, twice, closed.
• The receiving date, in under-clerk's numerals, on the reverse, where it is read only when the sheet is folded back.

The dockets that pass beneath such sheets are catalogued by a variety of means, the most troublesome being the Carbon Dating Archival, whose sittings have twice produced a date for a cover sheet earlier than the date of the mill that pressed it, and once, on a matter of some embarrassment, a date for the sheet's sealing that the sealing office had not yet issued.

Notes

Cover sheets are not stored in the annex. A readership so inclined may consult the Vellum of Permanence and Luminous Papyrus for the two schools of reasoning about whether a cover sheet may be dated and whether the dating of it is the dating of the docket, which institutionally it is not. The disagreement is older than the stamping offices. The covers, at least, are kept.