Lacunal Ephemera

Lacunal Ephemera is the class designation, under Procedures for the Cataloguing of Ephemera, for ephemeral holdings whose principal content is absence. The class is defined by what a holding omits rather than by what it contains: a ticket to an event that did not take place, a menu listing courses that were never served, a programme naming performers struck from the bill before printing. The Department of Ephemera recognises 4,112 distinct sub-varieties, of which 61 are catalogued on sight and the remainder require a determination from the Bureau of Unstated Functions.

The class was not named until Cycle 191, when a stack-survey on Floor 4,308 returned eleven crates of printed matter bearing no ink whatsoever. The surveyor, Second Amanuensis Ottiline Vare, recorded the crates as "blank, and not blank in the ordinary way," a phrasing that has survived four recensions of the Procedures without improvement.

Definition and boundary cases

Lacunal Ephemera are distinguished from ordinary incomplete holdings by intent. A damaged handbill is damaged; a handbill printed around a hole is lacunal. The test applied at the cataloguing table is whether the absence can be described in the same register as a presence — a lacunal ticket has a seat number, a lacunal menu has a price opposite the missing course. Where the gap admits no such description, the holding is transferred to the Department of Tattered Ephemera as decay rather than design.

Boundary disputes are frequent. Gastronomic Ephemera that omit an entire course fall under Ephemera, Seven-Day by default, and the Sub-librarian for Ephemera has twice ruled that a missing course is an omission of service rather than a lacuna of record. The Department of Applied Ephemera dissents, noting in the Annals of Applied Ephemera that a menu which lists a dish and then does not serve it produces, in the diner, an absence indistinguishable from the one the class describes. The matter remains open.

The F-holdings and the lacunal reading

The Bureau of Unstated Functions favours what it calls the lacunal reading of Class F — the position that Class F holdings are not mislaid but constitutionally absent, and that a shelf-mark is itself a kind of lacuna with a number attached. The Bureau's authority to issue provisional purposes for F-holdings has been invoked 309 times since Cycle 176, on each occasion to declare that a missing item is missing by design and should be catalogued accordingly.

"A thing not present in its place is present in its absence, and the absence has a place."

— Bureau of Unstated Functions, Provisional Purpose F-88

Volitional Ephemera of the lacunal variety — items that decline to appear — are the class's most contentious members, since a holding that chooses absence is difficult to distinguish from one that has merely been shelved on Floor 4,308 and not yet found.

Architectural and combustive cases

The Scriptorium of Ephemera inscribes Architectural Ephemera prior to materialisation, and its lacunal commissions are prepared by inscribing the plan and then ruling out the rooms. The resulting buildings are entered on the floor register with volumes and apertures but no interior. The practice is supervised daily by the Department of Ephemera and audited twice yearly by the Office of the Unbuilt Register.

Combustive Ephemera are lacunal from the moment of their destruction, and the class has absorbed them without amendment: the ash is catalogued, the object is not. A fire on Floor 6,112 in the winter of Cycle 193 consumed an entire annex of such holdings; the annex was subsequently catalogued as lacunal and the fire itself recorded as a sub-variety of the holding it produced.

The Vare grievance

Second Amanuensis Vare's claim to have originated the class was contested for forty years by the Registry of Precedents, which held that the eleven blank crates had been entered in a running hand on an earlier survey sheet since lost. Vare's grievance, filed in Cycle 194 and never concluded, argues that the Registry's own loss of the sheet constitutes a lacuna and ought therefore to be catalogued in the class it denies her. The Registry has declined to rule on the ground that ruling would require it to locate the sheet. Vare's memorandum of protest is itself held as a lacunal item, on the reasoning that its central argument is missing.

Handling and controversy

Lacunal holdings are stored in the ordinary way, in ordinary boxes, which are then catalogued as empty. Staff are reminded that a lacunal box is not to be filled. The Standing Order on Empty Containers (Concordance 17, Annex 9) forbids the reuse of such boxes for any purpose, and a dispute of Cycle 187 between the Department and the Guild of Boxmakers over whether a lacunal box is a box at all was settled by Concordance 22 in favour of the Boxmakers without reasons being recorded.

The Recursive Ephemera question remains unresolved. The Department of Ephemera and the Department of Tattered Ephemera jointly oversee recursive holdings, and a lacunal holding that describes its own absence is agreed on all sides to be recursive, but not agreed to be lacunal. Concordance 14 treats the class as closed and enumerable; Concordance 29 treats it as open and generative. Both are in force. Cataloguers are advised to consult the lower number first and to record their reasons.