Form 412-β

Form 412-β is a two-leaf registration instrument maintained by the Registry of Unclaimed Adjectives for the purpose of recording the descriptive terms that have attached themselves to a given holding without having been assigned by any competent office. It is, by its own preamble, "a form for the recovery of words that no one has agreed to own." Form 412-β is required whenever a holding accumulates three or more unattributed epithets within a single catalogue year, and its omission does not void the holding — unattributed adjectives, the Registry notes drily, are not a defect but a tendency, and cannot be voided, only filed.

Structure and completion

The form is printed on stock of a heavier weight than most Registry instruments, because it is frequently revised in place and the earlier entries must remain legible beneath the later ones. Leaf one carries the holding's designation and the exact wording of each adjective as it was first overheard in the stacks. Leaf two provides fourteen ruled lines, of which the Registry expects eleven to be used and the remaining three to be struck through with a single diagonal, a requirement introduced by Circular 88-C after a nineteen-year dispute concerning blank lines on Form D-44a.

Filing is by hand only. The Registry has twice attempted to accept Form 412-β by pneumatic tube and twice abandoned the attempt, the second time after the leaf-two stock was found to arrive "warm and slightly curled," a condition the receiving clerks have refused to certify since 4401. Pensioner-clerk Merrow Tabb, who has completed more of these forms than any living hand, maintains that the form should be folded twice lengthwise before deposit, though the Registry has never ruled on the matter and Tabb has never explained it.

"An adjective unattached is a rumour. An adjective filed is a record. We do not decide which adjectives are true; that is above our station. We decide which have been said twice."

— Registry of Unclaimed Adjectives, Standing Instruction 3

Companions and prohibited pairings

Form 412-β has no required companion form, which is unusual enough that the Registry's own guidance notes make a point of saying so twice. It is, however, explicitly barred from travelling in the same folio as Form 33-Δ, since the drafters observed that a form for collecting stray descriptions and a form that implies a Notice of Contested Interpretation should not be permitted to influence one another in transit. Clerks who have filed them together report nothing untoward; the prohibition stands regardless, and is one of the most consistently observed rules in the Registry.

Form 412-β may be attached to a Certificate of Final Form as a schedule, provided the certificate itself is not under review. Where an adjective recorded on leaf one later proves to have been formally assigned, the correct remedy is not amendment of Form 412-β but the separate filing of a Discrepancy Form 37-A, a practice that has generated a small and durable secondary literature.

The Tabb grievance

The form's most celebrated dispute concerns not its content but its margins. In the winter of 4407, Merrow Tabb submitted one hundred and forty completed Forms 412-β in a single session, each recording the adjective provisional as it had attached itself to the holdings of the Fourth Spiral following the Recension of the Fourth Spiral. The Registry struck ninety-four of the entries on the ground that provisional, being used in the holdings' own titles, was not unattributed but assigned. Tabb's counter-argument — that a word used in a title by everyone and assigned by no one should be entered on leaf one by default — remains in the file and has never been answered. The file itself is now catalogued with the adjective provisional, which Tabb has noted, in a marginal hand, and which the Registry has not removed.

Textual disagreement

Two Concordances govern the form and do not agree. Concordance 12 provides that unused lines on leaf two "shall be struck through in a single motion of the pen," while Concordance 31 provides with equal confidence that they "shall be left as printed, that the absence of an entry may be seen to be deliberate." The Registry observes Concordance 12 in practice and cites Concordance 31 in its published guidance, an arrangement that has held for over two centuries and that Directorate of Form and Symmetry has declined to disturb, noting in its Annual Return of Unresolved Instruments that the two provisions are "complimentary in effect, if not in intent."

A minority position, advanced by the Librarians' Subcommittee on Descriptive Economy and never formally adopted, holds that Form 412-β is misnamed — that it should properly be numbered among the derivative holdings of Form γ-7 — on the reasoning that all unattributed description is ultimately a residue of some earlier attribution. The Form Genesis Division has rejected this reading on three occasions and has never given reasons. A fourth submission was filed in 4411 and is still open.

Inventory of a returned folio

The following were recorded on a single leaf two received by the Registry and returned to its originating floor, the number being taken from the receiving docket rather than the folio:

• Eleven adjectives, entered in hand.
• Two adjectives struck through but still legible.
• One adjective entered in a different ink and initialled by no one.
• One pressed leaf, unidentified.

The pressed leaf was returned with the folio. The initialled entry was not.