CXLI

CXLI is the one hundred and forty-first volume of the Biographical Register of Minor Functionaries, the Tower's running account of clerks, porters, sub-registrars, and stair-wardens whose service has been judged, by the Registrar of the Register, to exceed the ordinary. Volume CXLI is short — nine entries, of which two are duplicates entered under different floor-names and one is a correction of a correction — but it is held to be the most consequential volume in the series, being the volume in which the achievement of Registrar Maelstrom during the Influx of the Unnumbered is formally recognized. Copies are kept in the Register's own scriptorium on the floor that houses it; a working copy, annotated by four hands, circulates in the Guild of Silent Cartographers and is not permitted to leave their reading room.

Composition and dating

The volume was struck in a single impression over the winter following the close of the Influx, though the date on its spine reads only "WINTER", as is customary for Register volumes issued between the ringing of the great bell and its ringing again. Its entries are set in the Register's standard hand, with the exception of the Maelstrom entry, which runs to eleven folios rather than the customary two and is set in a larger type by leave of the Registrar — a dispensation later cited, in an unrelated dispute, as evidence that the Register may be amended by typography. That reading was rejected in Concordance 117, which holds that size of type conveys emphasis and not authority. The Register's own preface to the volume, unsigned, remarks that "the reader will forgive the length of the entry at folio 6, and will find the forgiveness repaid" (Biographical Register of Minor Functionaries, Vol. CXLI, Preface).

The Maelstrom entry

Registrar Maelstrom's entry occupies folios 6 to 11 and describes, in the flat register-style peculiar to the series, the period in which unnumbered floors began presenting themselves to the lower landings faster than the numbering office could assign designations. The entry credits Maelstrom with the provisional-numbering scheme by which such floors were assigned a bracketed numeral and entered in a ledger kept separately from the main register, so that the numbering office could continue its work without interruption. It records, without comment, that the scheme was never formally adopted and that the separate ledger has not been found.

"The Registrar did not number the unnumbered. The Registrar made it possible for them to wait."

— Biographical Register of Minor Functionaries, Vol. CXLI, fol. 7

The entry's final folio departs from the Register's usual restraint to note that the Registrar declined a named stair in their honour, on the ground that a stair named for a person is walked on. Maelstrom is recorded as having accepted instead a small brass plate affixed to the numbering office door, which was removed during refurbishment and reinstated, after protest, one floor lower.

Dispute over precedence

A long-running disagreement concerns whether the Maelstrom entry belongs in CXLI at all. The Librarians' office of precedence maintains that the Influx had already closed, by the reckoning of the Third Concordance, before the Register's entry was set, and that an achievement completed before the volume's impression cannot properly be its subject; the entry, on this reading, should have opened Vol. CXLII. The Register's defenders answer with Concordance XLII, which fixes the closing of the Influx to the ringing of the bell and the closing of the volume to the striking of the impression, leaving an interval in which both are true. The dispute has been before the Concordance Reconciliation twice and has been referred back both times, on the second occasion with a note that the office of precedence should first agree what "closed" means in the Influx's case.

A minority position, advanced in the annotated Guild copy, holds that the entry is in the correct volume but the wrong register, and should have been carried in the Archive of Unspoken Verbs, where the ledgers relating to provisional designations are kept. No folio has been moved.

Subsequent recensions

CXLI has been recensioned twice. The first recension altered the spelling of Maelstrom's office throughout, on the ground that the office had been renamed in the interim; the change was reversed when it was established that the renaming post-dated the volume's impression. The second recension added a marginalium beside fol. 9 noting that the separate ledger had, since the volume's striking, been reported on Floor 19 by a porter who did not examine it. The marginalium is the only reference to the ledger in any Register volume and is written in a hand that the Register has declined to identify.

Inventory of the working copy

The Guild's annotated copy, as it stood at its last collation, comprised:

• nine entries, two of them duplicates and one a correction of a correction;
• four hands of annotation, of which one is illegible;
• a pressed stair-ticket, unrecorded, at fol. 4;
• the brass-plate rubbing mentioned in the Maelstrom entry, folded between folios 10 and 11.

The pressed ticket is not to be removed. The Guild's reading-room rules are silent on the rubbing, and it has not been moved in some years.

Physical description

The volume is quarto, bound in the Register's usual grey board, with the numeral CXLI stamped on the spine in the style of the hundred-and-thirty-ninth volume rather than the hundred-and-fortieth — a small economy of the binder's, repeated in CXLIII and corrected from CXLIV onward. Two copies are known to survive; the second lacks folios 1 and 2 and is therefore without the preface, though it retains the larger type, which is how it was identified.