Curatorial Office

The Curatorial Office is the smallest permanently constituted body of the Curatorial Guild, and the only one whose entire charge consists of a single room. It occupies Floor 4,411, a chamber of nine hundred and forty square feet, and it administers the Ordinance of the Occupied Chair, an instrument of some antiquity which no Librarian has been able to repeal and which no Office has been willing to inherit.

The Curatorial Office should not be confused with any of the Curatorial Guild's larger instruments — the Curatorial Board, the Curatorial Bench, the Curatorial Assembly — nor with the Bureau of Curatorial Acquisitions, which is an executive arm and answers correspondence. The Curatorial Office answers nothing. Its charter, as recorded in the Preamble to the Curatorial Practice, describes its duty as "the maintenance of a chair, and the consideration of what may be sat upon it."

Composition and appointment

The Office is held by three Curators of the Chair, appointed for staggered terms of eleven years. Appointments are made by the Curatorial Bench from a slate prepared by the Curatorial Board, and in practice the Bench has approved every slate presented to it since the office was reconstituted in the winter of the year recorded as 6,092 — a figure whose relation to the Tower's present date the Bench has declined to clarify on four separate occasions.

The three Curators are not permitted to meet in the room they administer. This restriction is set out in Third Concordance, Annex 9, which states that "the curatorship shall be exercised in rotation, that the chair be never approached by more than one Curator at a time, and that the door be closed behind each." The Curatorial Council has twice proposed amending Annex 9 to permit joint inspection; both proposals remain in the Curatorial Practicemaster Log of Amendments under the hand of a junior archivist who has since been reassigned twice.

The Ordinance of the Occupied Chair

The Ordinance dates from the period of the Second Recension and is known chiefly through a single surviving clause, quoted in every subsequent commentary on the Office:

"No object shall be placed upon the chair which has not first been catalogued, and no object shall be catalogued prior to its removal from the chair."

— Ordinance of the Occupied Chair, sole surviving clause

The difficulty is evident on inspection. An object discovered occupying the chair cannot be catalogued without first being removed, and cannot be removed without first being catalogued. The Curatorial Office has discharged its duty under this clause by an arrangement it calls provisional recognition: an uncatalogued object is acknowledged aloud, by name if it has one and by description if it does not, and is then carried to the threshold and back. The Office maintains a ledger of provisional recognitions; the most recent complete volume, Ledger 3,014: Provisional Recognitions, records four hundred and six entries, of which three hundred and eighty-one are the same cushion.

Dispute with the Office of Voluntary Correspondence

In the year recorded as 6,110 the Office received a letter addressed to "whoever is sitting in it." The letter bore no verifiable addressee. The Office of Voluntary Correspondence applied OVC Directive 14.7 and returned the letter to the Office with a note requesting that the Office confirm, in writing, which Curator had been seated at the time of delivery. The Curatorial Corps objected publicly that Directive 14.7 could not properly be applied to correspondence arising from an Ordinance that forbids the very act of confirming occupancy, and published a critique in eleven parts.

The Office itself took no position. Its reply, entered in the ledger, reads in full: "The chair was occupied. The writer's inquiry is therefore answered." The Office of Voluntary Correspondence has not written again. Directive 14.7 has not been amended.

Maintenance

Floor 4,411 is not served by the vertical collections, and falls under the High Curator of Vertical Collections only for purposes of stairwell numbering, which is disputed. The room is cleaned on the seventh day of each month by an attendant who is required to bring a second chair, identical in all respects to the first, and to place it in the corridor outside. The second chair is not catalogued. It is not to be brought inside under any circumstances.

Visiting Librarians may inspect the Office by prior arrangement. They may not sit down.

Scholarship

The central disagreement concerns whether the Office's chair is the original. Fourth Concordance, Appendix delta, asserts that the chair was replaced during the Quiet Restoration and that the Ordinances of the Occupied Chair therefore lapse; the Office rejects this reading on the ground that Appendix delta is itself uncatalogued, and cites Seventh Concordance, Clause 22, which provides that no document may establish the non-existence of an object it has not first described.

A minority view, associated with the Recursive Amendments Office and pressed by its then-secretary Clerk Amarin Voss, holds that the chair is neither original nor replacement but provisional, in the technical sense the Office invented, and that the Curatorial Office has been sitting on an object it has never finished cataloguing for one hundred and eight years. Voss's submission was received, numbered, and filed. It remains open. The chair remains occupied.