Final Charting and Ratification

Final Charting and Ratification is the compound designation given in the Tower's administrative literature to the two-stage procedure by which a decommissioned Holding is declared exhausted, its floor plan stabilized, its contents rendered immutable, and the whole thereafter approved for entry into the Register of Final Deposition. The designation is conventional rather than statutory. No single Concordance establishes the phrase, and the Seventh Concordance Amendment 19 Sub Clause a, which governs the sequence of the two stages, refers throughout to "the Charting" and "the Ratification" as though they were separate instruments drawn up by separate hands — a drafting habit that has caused four centuries of confusion and at least one clerical grievance still unsettled.

The distinction matters in practice. Final Charting is performed by the Scriptorium of Final Recourse, which holds the sole warrant for declaring architectural potential exhausted. Final Ratification is reviewed and confirmed elsewhere, at the Office of Final Forms on Floor 909, and requires the assembled judgment of the Ratification Quorum. A Holding that has been Charted but not Ratified is said to be "in the antechamber," and may remain so indefinitely. The longest recorded antechamber residence is that of the Holding at 4-Ember Stair, Charted in the winter of the year recorded as 6,112 and Ratified in 6,459.

The requirement of valid form

Neither stage may be initiated without a valid Certificate of Final Form. The Certificate is not, as is sometimes supposed, a certification that the Holding's form is final; it is a certification that the form under which the Holding is presently entered is the form against which exhaustion will be measured. The distinction was drawn at length in the Second Concordance, Annex 4, Clause 12, and the drafting there has never been improved upon. A successful Ceremony of Inscription yields the Certificate, which is then filed with the Bureau of Protocol Ratification on Floor 909 rather than with the Office of Final Forms, a separation of custody that the Senior Indexers' Guild has twice petitioned to have reversed.

Where the Holding in question has been de-accessioned or transposed — that is, moved from its original floor or assembled from parts of several — an ordinary Certificate is insufficient, and a CMV-Ω sub-class Certificate of Manifest Visitation must be obtained in addition. The sub-class was introduced after the transposition of the Salt Inventory of the Ninth Landing, whose contents were Charted against a floor they no longer occupied, producing a stabilized plan that described an empty stairwell for eleven years.

Procedure and the problem of the quorum

The Ratification Quorum comprises seven senior Librarians drawn by lot. Its vote must be a supermajority; the exact figure is given in the Third Concordance and disputed everywhere else. The Quorum does not examine the Holding. It examines the Charting, and may decline to ratify on grounds of form alone, irrespective of the condition of the floor.

"The Quorum shall not inquire into the furnishings, nor into the smell of the place, nor into whether the lamps are lit, these being matters settled by the Charting and not subject to review."

— Eleventh Concordance, Annex 2, para. 6

In 5,987 the Quorum declined ratification of the Charting of the Lower Reading Rooms on the ground that the Charting had been sealed in green wax, the colour reserved to provisional instruments. The error was traced to a supply substitution in the Scriptorium of Final Recourse and corrected within the month, but the Holding remained in the antechamber for two years while the Office of the Head Librarian determined whether a corrected seal required a fresh Ceremony. It did.

The Kettleman difficulty

Ratification copies are not originals, and the Tower has never entirely decided what this means. The Scriptorium of Final Recourse produced thirteen ratification copies of the Third Concordance, of which the Kettleman Copy is the eleventh. The Kettleman Copy differs from the others in one particular: it omits the word "together" from the sentence joining the two stages, so that on its authority the Charting and the Ratification need not be performed in sequence. The Office of the Grand Registrar has ruled the omission scribal; the Grand Registrar has declined to rule at all; and the Bureau of Protocol Ratification maintains a standing instruction that the Kettleman Copy not be consulted during Quorum deliberations, which it keeps in the same drawer as the copy itself.

Closure and Adhesive Silence

Once a Register of Final Deposition has been ratified, Adhesive Silence is applied to the Holding uniformly, under the direction of the Manual of Final Closures. The practice is not part of the Charting and is not reviewed by the Quorum; it follows the Ratification automatically, as night follows the closing of the shutters. Where a Holding has been Ratified but the Adhesive Silence has not been applied within the quarter, the Department of Provisional Holdings is notified, and generally does nothing, the Holding being no longer provisional.

The compound phrase "Final Charting and Ratification" was itself challenged in 6,201 by a clerk of the Office of Final Forms named Mirenne Holt, who argued that a compound designation implied a single instrument and thereby obscured the Scriptorium's separate warrant. Her memorandum ran to forty pages and was answered in three lines. The phrase remains in use. Clerk Holt was reassigned to the Stairwell Registry, where she is remembered for a marginal note, still legible, observing that the Tower has two words for the ending of a thing and no word at all for the wait between them.

Notes on the record

• Chartings initiated without a valid Certificate of Final Form: 14 recorded, 11 subsequently voided, 3 unresolved.
• Antechamber residences exceeding one century: 2, both on floors whose numbers have since been reassigned.
• Ratification copies of the Third Concordance in circulation: 13, of which 12 agree.
• Visitors are asked not to lean on the railings of the antechamber gallery on Floor 909. The railings are original.