Entry RIP-Σ-001

Entry RIP-Σ-001 is a retrospective index designation assigned by the Register of Intermediate Purposes to the undermost surviving catalogue of the Sigma series. The entry is not, strictly, an entry: it has no folio of its own, no subject line, and no Identification field. It is the accumulated record of approximately forty thousand entries that were logged in the Sigma series and then withdrawn before their folios were sealed. Entry RIP-Σ-001 records the withdrawals.

The designation is a reconstruction. The original index page for the Sigma series survives only as a carbon impression across three folios of Entry 891-Sigma, and the alphanumeric-sigilic code RIP-Σ-001 was assigned to it in the winter of the year the Spiral Athenaeum was recatalogued, by Junior Registrar Ovin Marsh, who has stated that he chose the Sigma letter because the impression showed one and chose the numeral because he could not read the number that was there.

Composition

Entry RIP-Σ-001 consists of 40,112 withdrawal slips, bound in the order in which the withdrawals were filed rather than the order in which the entries were logged. The distinction matters: a slip for a Sigma entry withdrawn on a late date may sit ahead of a slip for an earlier withdrawal, and the volume has been described by Septima Vell, Archivist of the Undermost Floor as "an index of the act of forgetting, kept alphabetically by no one's arrangement" (Marginalia on the Sigma Recension, fol. 22r).

Each slip carries four fields: the withdrawn entry's code (often struck through), the withdrawing officer's seal, the stated reason, and a blank. The blank is standard. Concordance 44, Annex 2, requires it on every slip of this class and nowhere states its purpose. Of the 40,112 slips, 39,860 show the reason as redundant. The remaining 252 show a variety of inscriptions, among them eleven that read only no.

The Marsh Finding and the reverse-reading dispute

In the year following his recataloguing, Marsh issued a finding — filed, unusually, as a note to his own index rather than as a document — that the 40,112 Sigma entries had in fact existed and were withdrawn because a duplicate series had been logged against them. This position is supported by the carbon impression, which appears to show the phrase the same thing twice at the head of the relevant folio, a phrase also found in the procedural annex to Entry 891-Sigma and long associated with the recension describing Entry 12,455.

The contrary position, held by the Office of Sequential Corrections and set out in its Memorandum on Sigma Reversals, is that no Sigma entry was ever logged, and that the withdrawal slips are the primary act, filed in anticipation of themselves. The Memorandum argues that if the entries had existed, one would expect at least one to survive in an unsealed state; none does; and the absence is evidence of the Office's reading rather than against it.

"The Sigma series did not withdraw its entries. The Sigma series withdrew. The distinction is one of temper, and the Office declines to pursue it further."

— Memorandum on Sigma Reversals, closing paragraph

The dispute has run for so long that Resolution 12 has been cited by both parties, in both directions. Neither citation has been withdrawn, and neither is expected to be.

Relation to the RIP series

Entry RIP-Σ-001 sits in the RIP series alongside Entry RIP-Ξ-909 and Entry RIP-Δ-117, but its kinship is formal only. Entry RIP-Ξ-909, the meta-catalogical designation for a catalog entry concerning its own non-existence, concerns a proposed entry; Entry RIP-Σ-001 concerns a body of withdrawn ones. Entry RIP-Δ-117 differs again in concerning a single entry withdrawn for reasons the record describes at length. The three are shelved together because the series letters are close, not because their subjects are.

The entry's physical home is the Perpetual Awaiting tray in the Hall of Unresolved Queries, where it shares a divider with Entry RIP-Ξ-909 and is, by the tray-keeper's own admission, never consulted. The tray-keeper keeps a separate note of consultations; the note for Entry RIP-Σ-001 shows nought in every year but two.

The Marsh grievance

Marsh's finding was never entered in the Primary Entry sequence. He petitioned for its elevation six times over eleven years, on each occasion citing Ordinance 4, and on each occasion the Office of Sequential Corrections replied that the note was already permanent, having been incorporated into the index it described, and that elevation would therefore constitute the very duplication it declined to recognise. Marsh's sixth petition closes: "I have been told that my finding is safe. I would prefer that it were findable." The petition was filed, sealed with the Seal of First Entry, and set in the Perpetual Awaiting tray.

The Final Entry Amp Seal has never been affixed to Entry RIP-Σ-001. A folio must be sealed before the Alpha glyph is set upon it, and the entry has no folio; the question of whether the glyph could be affixed to the tray itself has been put to the Register of Intermediate Purposes and remains, by the Register's own description, the lowest-priority question in its keeping.

Maintenance

The volume is rebound every ninth year in the standard Sigma binding. Staff are asked not to read the slips in reverse order, as two of the eleven slips reading no were found in 1904 to have been filed upside down, and the finding that resulted from reading them the right way up has never been reconciled with the Marsh finding. The rebinding is done on the third landing, where the light is better.