Intake Ledger — The Tower

The Intake Ledger is the running register, maintained in continuous recension since at least the fourth century of the present numbering, in which every subject presented to the Tower for cataloguing is entered before it may be assigned a floor, a number, or a name. It is not a single volume. The Ledger is a class of document: some four hundred and eleven bound sequences are presently in active use, of which the oldest, the Ledger of Primogeniture, is the only one whose pages are never turned except under the supervision of two Librarians who must not be related by blood, marriage, or the shared tenancy of a stairwell.

Entry in the Intake Ledger is the sole legal act of arrival. A subject not entered has not arrived; a subject entered has, for the purposes of the Tower, always been here. This asymmetry is the source of nearly all the doctrine that follows.

The Ledger and the Act of Arrival

The Ledger records, at minimum, the presentation date in cycle and day, the presenting porter, the substance or class of the subject, and a descriptive line left deliberately short. The shortness is prescribed. Provisional Guidelines for Intake, clause 6, holds that "no entry shall exceed the hand's reach of a single indrawn breath," a requirement understood to prevent the Ledger from becoming an account of anything rather than a record of its arrival. Porters who exceed the line are fined one seal, and their excess is copied separately into a Half-Processed Intake file, which may or may not later be reunited with its parent entry. In most instances it is not.

The distinction matters because the Tower recognises the entry, not the subject. Sub-Curator Havelord Frayne, annotating the intake ledger for the Avian-Silicate Hybrids in Cycle 8,746, wrote only the word arrived in the descriptive line. Subsequent enquiry established that this single word was sufficient: the Hybrids were catalogued, floored, and stabilised on the strength of it, without any further description having been attempted. Annotating practice has since come to favour single words where possible.

Relation to the Intake Stations

The Intake Ledger does not house itself. Entries are made at the intake desks of Floor 112, Annex B, where the Matriculation Ledger and the Ledger of Intake are kept on adjacent lecterns in the same room, and a reader wishing to consult both must move between them in the order the desk clerk directs. Entries originating at Floor 12,004 arrive at the Annex already written, on the intake slips that substances carry through the Hall, and are transcribed into the Ledger without alteration — including alterations. A slip bearing a correction is transcribed with the correction, and the original reading is not preserved. Edda Vellworth, a porter at Floor 12,004, recorded in her own notebook: "the substance precedes the form, and the ledger precedes both." The notebook has since been entered in the Ledger, which is considered to have settled the question.

Stations established under later revisions create their own ledger sequences, which are tributary to the main run and not identical with it. Intake 99,997, created under clause 19 of Provisional Guidelines for Intake, maintains a sequence that is closed to readers without a Distribution Class; Intake 99,998, one bay west, maintained a parallel sequence until its closure, and the two were reconciled only once, badly, by the procedures set out in Procedures for Ledger Reconciliation. The primary stations operate under the First Concordance, whose addenda distinguish "first instances" from "repetitions of first instances," a distinction the Ledger is required to mark in the left margin and frequently does not.

The Grievance of Clerk Ostrander Mell

In the winter of Cycle 8,109 the scriptorium at Annex B was heated by two braziers, one of which was reserved for the drying of ink and the other for the drying of the clerks. A dispute arose between the transcribing clerks and the Office of Marginal Correctness over whether marginal marks in the Ledger constituted entry or commentary. The Office held that a margin was not a page; the clerks held that they had been instructed to use it. The matter was referred to the Ninth Concordance, Annex 2, which found for the Office, and to the Eleventh Concordance, Annex 2, which found for the clerks, the two annexes having been drafted in the same session by clerks who were, by the reckoning of the Office, the same person.

The dispute is remembered chiefly for the grievance of Clerk Ostrander Mell, who had made eleven thousand marginal marks over four cycles and was required to strike them all. Mell struck them in a single continuous line, so that the Ledger for those cycles now appears ruled rather than annotated, and submitted a memorandum stating that he had "removed the marks but not the knowledge of where they were." The memorandum was entered in the Ledger. It is the only entry in the affected run that was not struck.

Scholarly Disagreement

Whether the Ledger is a register of arrivals or a register of permissions remains unresolved. The Second Concordance treats entry as permissive — a subject entered may be catalogued — while the Seventh Concordance treats it as constitutive, holding that cataloguing follows entry "as the shadow follows the standing body" (Annex 5). The practical difference is small, since no case is recorded of a subject entered but not catalogued, unless one counts Intake 99,998, whose entries were catalogued after the station's closure and are now filed under the station that supplanted it.

A second dispute concerns the direction of writing. The main run ascends the page; the tributary sequences at Intake 99,997 descend it, and Intake 1, governed by the First Concordance, alternates according to a rule not restated since the addenda of Cycle 6,002. Readers consulting a sequence for the first time are advised to establish the direction before reading, and not after.