Keeper of the Interregnum

The Keeper of the Interregnum is the office charged with maintaining continuity of authority during any period in which formal cataloguing authority is suspended. The office is unusual in that it possesses no jurisdiction during ordinary operation: its holder exercises no catalogue rights whatsoever while the Tower is functioning normally, and becomes, for the duration of a lapse, the sole legitimate signatory of shelf assignments. The office is presently held by Keeper Alaric, who has held it since Cycle 944 and who has never, in that tenure, been called to act.

The Keeper of the Interregnum is not to be confused with the Keeper of Temporary Jurisdictions, whose authority is spatial rather than temporal, nor with the Keeper of Provisional Inks, who supplies materials rather than authority. The distinction is set out plainly in Fourth Concordance, Annex 2: "The Keeper of the Interregnum governs the hour; the Keeper of Temporary Jurisdictions governs the room."

Origin and the Shelving Question

The office was created in the aftermath of the Interregnum of Provisional Shelving, the administrative lapse that spanned Cycle 717 to Cycle 728. During that period formal cataloguing authority was suspended, and the Shelving Assembly found itself unable to certify even routine relocations. The eleventh year of the Interregnum is the earliest surviving use of the term Shelving Location, a designation devised precisely because no one held authority to assign shelves in the ordinary way.

When authority was restored, the Assembly resolved that the lapse should not recur unmanaged. Second Concordance, Article 9, established a standing office whose holder would assume signatory power the moment authority lapsed again. The relevant clause is brief and has been litigated for three centuries:

"Let there be one who holds nothing, that when all hold nothing, one may hold something."

— Second Concordance, Article 9

The drafting is generally attributed to Clerk Ambrose of the Ninth Landing, whose marginalia on the working copy read, in a hand now badly faded, "this will be misread." It has been.

The Trigger Problem

Difficulty arises from the fact that an interregnum must be recognised before the Keeper can act, and recognition is itself an exercise of the authority that has lapsed. The office therefore depends on external instruments. The Interregnum of Provisional Shelving was in later recensions defined as a forty-eight-hour period triggered by the activation of Form M-7, an instrument that may be filed by any Librarian of the fourth grade or above, and which requires no countersignature.

This produces the office's characteristic pathology. In Cycle 1006 a Form M-7 was filed in error by a clerk at the Office of the Keeper of Precedents who believed he was requesting a replacement desk. The Keeper of the Interregnum, then Keeper Hesper before her elevation to the Bureau of Unclaimed Categories, duly assumed signatory power for forty-eight hours and reassigned one hundred and forty shelves on the Thirty-First Spiral before the error was noticed. The reassignments were never reversed; Fifth Concordance, Annex 6, subsequently ruled them valid on the ground that "authority exercised in good faith during a recognised lapse is not undone by the discovery that the lapse was inconvenient."

Powers During a Lapse

Within a recognised interregnum the Keeper may assign, reassign, and seal shelves; may certify locations provisionally; and may speak for the catalogue in all matters except the deposition of a Keeper of the Spiral, which remains reserved. The Keeper may not amend a Concordance, may not open a new floor, and may not authorise the movement of anything held under Unspoken Components seal. During the Interregnum of the Still Tongue, when spoken administrative direction was suspended from Cycle 902 to 918, the office's written instruments were for sixteen cycles the only binding administrative output in the Tower; the volume of paper produced in that period has never been fully shelved.

Holders of the office are required to keep a lantern lit in the office at all times, whether or not the Tower is in lapse, so that the transition may occur without delay.

Scholarly Disagreement

There is no settled view on whether the office is continuous or constituted anew at each lapse. The Third Concordance treats the Keeper as holding a single perpetual office, dormant between lapses; the Sixth Concordance, Article 1, insists that each interregnum creates a fresh appointment, and that the incumbent must be reconfirmed by the Librarians within one hour of the lapse's recognition. Under the Sixth's reading, Keeper Alaric's tenure is not a tenure at all but a standing nomination awaiting a vote that has never been called.

A minority position, advanced by the historian of the Office of the Keeper of Precedents and never formally rebutted, holds that the office has in fact been vacant since Cycle 728 and that every subsequent exercise of its powers — including the hundred and forty reassignments of Cycle 1006 — was void. No Keeper has endorsed this view in writing. The lantern, in any case, remains lit.

Succession

The office is conferred by the Keeper of the Spiral from among Librarians who have never held catalogue rights, a qualification that has excluded most senior candidates. Keeper Valerian was twice offered the office and twice declined, citing his concurrent holdings as Keeper of Unspoken Components and Keeper of Paradoxes. The refusal is recorded without comment in the register of the Keeper of the Threshold, who witnessed it. Applicants are advised that the office carries no stipend and no floor.