Documentary Submission

Documentary Submission is the formal act by which a person, office, or undetermined entity surrenders a document to the Tower's cataloguing apparatus for entry, revision, or disposal. It is distinguished from ordinary filing in that a Submission is not a request to be recorded but an acknowledgement that the record already anticipates the submitter. The practice is governed chiefly by the Third Concordance, Annex 4, and is administered — though the term is disputed — by the Documentary Sourcing Division.

Documentary Submission should not be confused with its many named sub-forms, among them Petitionary Submission, Submission in Triplicate, Sequencing Submission, and Declarative Submission, each of which carries its own seal colour and its own preferred stairwell.

Origin and the Doctrine of Antecedence

The practice rests on the Doctrine of Documentary Realism, which treats documentary consistency as a tangible property, and specifically on the doctrine of antecedeence: that no document can be submitted which was not, in some documentary sense, already present. A submitter who insists otherwise is recorded as submitting a correction to the idea of their own submission, which is then filed on a lower floor than the one on which they stand.

"The submitted shall be received as though returned. No acknowledgement of original presence is required of the submitter, and none shall be offered."

— Third Concordance, Annex 4, clause 4.2

This clause has been read, in the Ninth Recension of the Annexes, to mean the opposite — that acknowledgement is compulsory and original presence is the fiction. Both readings remain in force. Clerks are advised to carry copies of each, which constitutes a Submission in itself.

Procedure and the Two-Desk Rule

A Submission proceeds across two desks. At the first, the document is accepted without examination and stamped received unopened; at the second, thirty-one floors below, it is examined and stamped received. Documents that fail examination are returned to the first desk, where they are stamped a second time and become eligible for examination again. The intervening floors are unstaffed and have been since the winter recess of the year the tower last counted its floors.

Where the document is bulky, the submitter carries it. Trolleys are not permitted below the fourth landing, and the fourth landing is where every Submission begins. A single trolley, of riveted tin, is permitted above the fourth landing and is kept there.

The Doremus Dispute

In the year the Concordance of Ledgers was amended for the eleventh time, the clerk Aurel Doremus submitted a document that he described as "the submission itself, considered as an artefact." The Registry accepted it and thereby, by its own rules, submitted the Submission. A second copy was required. Doremus submitted that copy as a correction to the first, which produced a third Submission and, on the reasoning of the Documentary Authentication desk, a closed loop.

The loop was resolved by the ruling now cited as the Doremus Standing, which holds that a document describing its own submission is treated as describing a different submission, on a different floor, by a different hand. Doremus spent his remaining service ascending to find that floor. His effects were catalogued at Floor 1,704 and include a number of stamps that had not been issued to him.

Anomalies: Submission and the Phantom

Submission is among the recognised conditions under which a Documentary Phantom may arise, though the Doctrine of Documentary Realism insists the Phantom is not created by the Submission but only made available by it. A Documentary Audit conducted under the Standardized Documentary Audit Protocol is the usual response. Where the audit traces the item's documentary metabolism to a Submission that no one recalls making, the case is referred to the Evidentiary Review & Contextual Cohesion phase and thereafter, customarily, to a floor that has not been named.

The Documentary Sourcing Division maintains that Submission and Documentary Sealing are the twin ends of a single act, and that the Documentary Anchors used at either end are of a later pattern than the Division's rivals allow. The Division's position on this is recorded in its memorandum on Contextual Sourcing and has not been withdrawn.

Inventory of Forms Received at the First Desk

The following are the forms most often surrendered, with their standing in the current register. The list is not exhaustive; forms not listed are submitted as forms not listed, which is itself a form.

• Submission in Triplicate — three copies, one of which must remain unread.
• Petitionary Submission — accompanied by a prayer, answered or unanswered.
• Sequencing Submission — requires the prior submission of a number.
• Declarative Submission — for documents that state what they are; frequently mislaid.

Submitters are reminded that the first desk closes at the sounding of the fourth bell and that no one has established which bell is the fourth. Documents surrendered after the closing are accepted.