Form N-7

Form N-7 is a single-sheet declaration, held in the custody of the Form Genesis Division, by which a filer asserts that a given document has ceased to describe anything. It is not a declaration of falsehood, nor of error, nor of malice; Form N-7 asserts only that the document in question no longer has a subject. The distinction has occupied the Directorate of Form and Symmetry for one hundred and forty years and remains, in the Directorate's own words, "live and unbilled" (Directorate of Form and Symmetry, Memorandum 4,411).

Structure and appearance

Form N-7 is printed on stock of 96 gsm, cream, unruled, and is distinguished from every other declaration in the N-series by the absence of a witness line. The omission is deliberate. Clause 2 of the form states: "A declaration of subject-lack requires no witness, as no witness can attest to what is not there to be attested to."

The body of the form consists of a single rectangle, 11 cm by 4 cm, within which the filer is to write a description of the absent subject. Filers are instructed by Annex Γ of Form NOC-4a: Filing Instructions to leave the rectangle empty where the subject cannot be described, which has led to the practical difficulty that an empty rectangle is indistinguishable from an uncompleted one. The Registry has declined to rule on the matter, noting only that Form N-7 has never in its history been returned for incompleteness.

Relation to Form M-7

Form N-7 is frequently confused with Form M-7 'Declaration of Nonexistence', and the confusion is not discouraged by the Form Genesis Division, which distributes both. The distinction is one of sequence. Form M-7 declares that a subject never existed; Form N-7 declares that it existed and has since stopped. A subject declared under Form M-7 is treated as having been void from the outset, while one declared under Form N-7 retains its prior floor assignments and standing in the index.

The confusion has consequences. In the winter of the year recorded as 6,318, a clerk of the Ninth Scriptorium filed a Form M-7 against a standing entry in the eastern stacks and thereby voided its floor assignment retroactively. The floor, deprived of its entry, could not be located for nine days. The clerk's grievance — that no one had told him the forms were different — is preserved in the Register of Unresolved Complaints, entry 2,204, and has never been answered.

The Custodial Dispute

The Form Genesis Division maintains that Form N-7 falls within its remit by extension of the Primacy of Form doctrine, since a form that removes a subject from the index performs the same generative office as the forms that place subjects there. The Directorate objects that removal is not generation and that the Division has, in the Directorate's phrase, "confused the emptying of a room with its construction" (Memorandum 4,411, annex 2).

Two Concordances support conflicting positions. Third Concordance Annex 7 assigns all N-series forms to the Division without qualification. The Eleventh Concordance, drafted eleven months later, assigns to the Directorate "all forms touching the cessation of standing," which the Directorate reads as including Form N-7 and the Division reads as excluding it, on the grounds that a declaration does not itself cease anything. Neither Concordance has been amended, and no filing has ever been refused on either authority.

Filing procedure and the companion question

Form N-7 is filed alone. It has no required companion, a singularity it shares only with the Certificate of Final Form, and the absence is noted on the form itself in a printed marginal gloss: "No companion is required. See over." The reverse of the form bears no text.

Filing is by hand delivery to the N-series window on the floor to which the declaring clerk is currently assigned. The window accepts filings on days when the stairwell lamp is lit. In practice the lamp is lit on most days and the window is staffed on few of them, and a clerk who arrives on an unlit day is instructed by the window notice to return with the form, unaltered, and to consider the day's absence part of the declaration.

"The form is complete when the filer has stopped believing the document. The sheet is a courtesy."

— Form Genesis Division, Standing Instruction 19

Recorded effects

A completed Form N-7 does not destroy the document to which it refers. The document remains in the stacks, catalogued, retrievable, and legible. What changes is its classification: it is moved from the General Index to the Register of Subjects Departed, a bound volume kept on the second gallery and consulted by appointment. Documents in the Register may still be read. Readers report that they read differently, though no reader has been able to say how, and the Bureau of Registry Docket Form Ir 9 has recorded the difficulty as a standing feature of the Register rather than a defect.

Filers are reminded that a document entered in the Register may be restored by the filing of Form D-44a, provided the original declaration is produced. The original declaration is held by the Division, not the filer, and is produced on request.