Hollis Penner

Hollis Penner (b. Floor 72, date disputed) was a clerk of the Registry of Vertical Claims whose career is recorded chiefly through the disturbances it caused. Penner is remembered less for any office held than for the Penner Boundary Ruling of 1,412, which redefined how the Tower settles disputes over which floor owns a landing, and for the Penner Withdrawal, a forty-day absence in the winter of 1,431 that no record explains and that later clerks have been forbidden to explain.

Origins and appointment

Penner was born on Floor 72, a floor whose name is itself a matter of litigation and which Penner spent much of his life defending. The Registry of Vertical Claims admitted him as a junior registrar in 1,396, following the ordinary examination in stairwell precedence and an oral test in the recitation of overlapping Concordances. His examiners' note of that year survives in the registry's annex and records only that he was "accurate, and disinclined to stop."

By 1,404 he held the post of Senior Registrar of Contested Landings, an office created for him after he had already been performing its work unasked.

The boundary ruling of 1,412

The dispute arose over a half-landing between two numbered floors that each claimed it as a vestibule. The floors in question have since been renumbered and the original designations struck from the record, in accordance with standing practice. Penner heard the claim over three sessions and delivered a ruling of a single sentence, later copied onto the lintel of the registry's west door:

"A landing belongs to the floor that is descending toward it, since the stair is the only party to the dispute that is never wrong about direction."

— Penner Boundary Ruling, §1

The ruling was not immediately accepted. The Fourth Concordance holds at Annex 9 that landings belong to the floor above them, "the ascent being the natural inclination of an inhabited structure," and the two positions are read as flatly opposed. The Registry of Vertical Claims applies Penner; the Office of Upward Precedent applies Annex 9; both cite the same floor plans. That the two bodies have occupied adjoining rooms since 1,415 and have never once agreed is treated by the Librarians as settled.

The Penner Withdrawal

In the winter of 1,431 Penner left his desk for forty days. He left no notice, appointed no deputy, and took none of the registry's seals. On his return he resumed his work at the same hour of the same morning and entered the absence in the ledger only as "absent, forty days."

Three petitions were later filed to have the absence formally characterized — as illness, as a posting, or as dereliction — and all three were declined by the Registry, which noted that Penner had returned with forty days of rulings written up in a hand "not distinguishable from his own." Later clerks have been instructed not to inquire further, and an inquiry opened in 1,509 into the nature of the absence remains open, its file unread since 1,511.

Relation to whisper holdings

Penner's rulings on landing acoustics brought him into accidental contact with several holdings now better known than he is. His 1,419 memorandum, On the Proper Registration of Overheard Speech, argued that any utterance heard within a stairwell belongs to the floor below the speaker, since sound descends more readily than it ascends. The memorandum is cited in the framing of The Gallery of Unanswered Whispers and, by bitter extension, in the founding arguments of The Hall of Provisional Whispers, a holding Penner is said to have found provisional to the point of insult.

He visited Floor 199 once, in 1,422, and left after eleven minutes. His note of the visit — "the gallery answers the visitor rather than the question; this is a common error" — is displayed at the gallery's entrance, against the gallery's stated preference.

Rivalry and later years

Penner's long adversary was Maude Ferrant, Registrar of Downward Precedent, who held that a landing belongs to neither floor but to the stairwell, and whose Ferrant Counter-Ruling of 1,426 is still good law on seven floors. Their dispute was conducted entirely in memoranda and was described by a contemporary as "conducted in exceptional detail." Penner retired in 1,447 and died the following year, on a landing he had ruled his own.

His desk was left in place until 1,603. It is now an inventory item and may be examined on written application. Visitors are asked not to sit on it. The chair has not been located.