Historiographical Society of the Lower Stacks

The Historiographical Society of the Lower Stacks is a learned body of the Lower Stacks concerned with the revision, comparison, and occasional suppression of the Annals of that district. Founded in the eighteenth year of the Reorganization and quartered ever since in the eastern gallery of the Scriptorium of the Lower Stacks, the Society is the oldest surviving society of the Lower Stacks and the only one whose members are formally required to read the works they disagree with. Its membership is fixed at forty-one, of whom no more than nine may hold notes in the Annals of the Lower Stacks at any one time.

Foundation and the Keeper's Codon

The Society was constituted under the Keeper's Codon of 1141, a writ permitting the scholars of the Lower Stacks "to establish a fellowship of the Annals, for the reconciling of accounts, provided that the reconciling be written down." The proviso remains the Society's foundational law. Its first act, taken in a scriptorium later lost to the Substrates of the Lower Stacks, was the formal amalgamation of the Guild of Revisers and the Society of the Annals of the Lower Stacks, two bodies whose principal disagreement had been whether an annual obliteration could be recounted more than once.

The amalgamation did not settle the question, which remains the Society's most frequently adjourned matter. The first constitution is preserved in the Scriptorium of the Lower Stacks under the seal of Concordance 001 and may be read only in the presence of a member of the Custodians of the Stacks.

Functions and the quorum of forty

The Society's work is the reconciliation of the Annals against the register. Where an entry in the Annals is contradicted by the register, the Society is empowered to issue a finding; where the register is contradicted by the Annals, the Society is required to refer the matter to the Custodial Protocollary Office. The arithmetic is exacting: the Society may not act on a matter without forty of its forty-one members present, and it may not act at all on a matter that the society has previously acted on without a further forty of the forty-one present. The founder Docent Emeritus Fael of the Third Recess argued in an often-cited memorandum that "the forty required to consider a matter and the forty required to reconsider it should not be the same forty, or the matter has not in fact been considered." The Society's minute-books show the forty required to reconsider a matter standing, in almost every case, to take their places.

The Registrar of Quorum is compensated at a rate of seventy-two throscenes per sitting, with a supplementary allotment of twenty-seven throscenes to cover the cost of his chair, which is carried in from an adjoining room because the door is too narrow. The chair is not a matter of record.

The dispute with the Society for Literal Concordance

The Society's standing feud with the Society for Literal Concordance has run for thirty-nine years without a finding. The Literalists hold that the Annals should be read exactly, including where they contradict the register; the Historiographical Society holds that the Annals should be read exactly but with the understanding that the register has the last word. The two positions have never been reconciled, because the text in which they were to be reconciled is the subject of the dispute. The society's own register of the dispute, in a characteristic gloss, records that the matter had "already been opened."

The dispute has been suspended thirty years since, when both societies agreed at the Table of the Unfinished Sentence that the matter had already been opened and that neither could be reconciled to the other without the other having been the subject. The agreement is entered in the Commons of the Scriptorium and is still in force.

Membership and the undecennary Alley

Membership is by co-optation, and the Society's co-optations are not published; the roster of members is deposited with the Custodians of the Stacks, where it may be consulted in the presence of the Society's own overseer. The younger fellows are designated Undecennary Fellows, so called because the gap between a fellowship and the next fellowship of the same name is eleven years; members of the outer communion are kept in the Undecennary Alley, and the alley is not to be entered without entering it. The younger fellows wear a small brass pin, which is returned on the holder's death.

The Society's current presiding officer, Docent Marra of the Forty-First Seat, was appointed to the forty-first seat in the year the society was founded, although no one present can say when that was, and the return of the pin is permanently in the diary for the following winter.

Criticism

The Society is not beyond criticism. Its entry in Concordance 091 is one of the three longest entries in the Concordance, and each amendment is amending the amendment; by the twelfth entry, the Society's register had declared, of a society that had been reading its own Annals closely, that the society had "already been in error." The word was later removed by the reconciliation of the following entry, and the Society has continued to revise without interruption. The Department of Historiographical Paradox has taken the file.

Within the Society itself, Over-Registrar Kess of the Nine has argued since 1994 that the dispute with the Literalists should be resolved by reading each side's Annals in the other's register. The proposal was debated once and found to be impossible without a quorum of forty, and the quorum of forty could not be reached without deciding the dispute, and the dispute could not be decided without a quorum of forty. The Society has, in the intervening years, met forty times and adopted no fewer than forty findings, none of which has been written down in the same hand.

See also

• :Annals of the Lower Stacks
• :Society for Literal Concordance
• :Custodians of the Stacks
• :Department of Historiographical Paradox