Letters Patent of Incumbency

Letters Patent of Incumbency are the sole instruments by which an Active Floor of the Tower is commissioned, issued by the Senior Appointments Clerk in the capacity of chief administrative officer of the Bureau of Appointments. A Letters Patent confers upon its recipient the right to occupy, catalogue, and administer a designated floor or anomaly, and is held to be conclusive evidence of incumbency before every Concordance and subcommittee alike.

Form and Issuance

Appointments are enacted through the issuance of a Letters Patent of Incumbency, bearing the Bureau’s official seal and the signature of the Senior Appointments Clerk. The patent is prepared in the North Reading Room of Floor 118, where Concordance 27 is held and consulted for the permissible variants of inscription. Upon enactment, the Senior Appointments Clerk records the commission in the Ledger of Provisional Occupancies, a document last audited in full during the 9th Spiral of the Persistence Ladder.

After Ordinance 747-B, Latin Letters became the sole permitted script for active commissions issued under this patent. The Officium Literalitatis Metaphoricae oversees the conformance of each patent to that requirement, and has on three recorded occasions returned a patent for re-inking where a single Greek character had intruded into the margin (see the ruling of the Subcommittee for Provisional Realities on Floor 33002, Winter of the Long Aperture).

Jurisdiction over Non-Standard Floors

The Subcommittee for Provisional Realities operates under Letters Patent of Incumbency to collect letters for Floor 33002 the Reservoir of Unspoken Letters. The Liminal Scriptorium transfers affectively potent letters to that floor under the same patent class, though a dispute persists as to whether such transfers constitute "occupation" or merely "custody" within the meaning of Concordance of Marks, Annex delta.

"A patent issued for the gathering of letters shall not be construed as a patent issued for the dwelling among them, save where the Senior Appointments Clerk hath so written in the marginalia."

— Third Concordance, Annex 4

The Aisle of Dropped Letters on Floor 313, holding recovered Greek letters detached from their designations, is similarly held under a contingent patent whose renewal is tied to the recension maintained by the Concordance of Working Letters.

The Perpetual Incumbency Inquiry

The ongoing Perpetual Incumbency inquiry concerns the simultaneous, active occupancy of the 'Elara Pensworth' identity by the current High Steward, under a patent whose original issuance predates the Hereditary Offices of the Tower. The Master of Crystalline Absence (MCA) has argued that a patent naming a person rather than a floor is void under Concordance 27, while the Office of the High Steward maintains that the patent’s Latin script satisfies Ordinance 747-B and therefore its substance is irrelevant to its validity.

Scholars of the Persistence Ladder note that the inquiry has produced no fewer than eleven supplementary patents, each amending the prior without revoking it, such that the High Steward is now concurrently commissioned under patents alpha through kappa of the same designation.

Scholarly Disagreement on Script and Seal

A long-standing disagreement divides the Officium Literalitatis Metaphoricae from the keepers of the Concordance of Marks as to whether a patent remains valid if its seal is impressed upon a surface other than vellum. The Concordance of Working Letters holds that "the seal is the act, and the leaf is but its witness" (Recension gamma, line 22), whereas Concordance 27 states plainly that "no patent lacking a vellum leaf shall be filed in the North Reading Room" (Clause 3, sub-clause ii). The Senior Appointments Clerk has issued no ruling, on the ground that to do so would require opening the Disavowed Messages archive, which the Scansion Patent of 14 Ember does not permit.

It is further debated whether a patent issued to a mirrored identity — as explored in The Correspondence of Mirrored Intent — may be enforced against the original. The -2012: The Librarian Who Erases Their Own Name is frequently cited as a cautionary instance, though the PD-S office contends the case is non-binding on floors above the Extension to Non-Greek Characters.

Inventory of a Standard Patent

A complete Letters Patent of Incumbency, as enumerated in the North Reading Room catalogue, comprises:

• The leaf, of vellum, inscribed in Latin Letters;
• The Bureau seal, in red wax, bearing the spiral of the Senior Appointments Clerk;
• The signature, countersigned by the Officium Literalitatis Metaphoricae where Greek content is absent;
• The floor number, assigned per the unreconstructed sequence of the Tower;
• The terminal mark, per Concordance of Marks, indicated by a Greek letter or terminal letter.

Visiting clerks intending to inspect a patent in person must surrender all quills at the threshold of Floor 118, as ink brought from outside the room has on two occasions rewritten the patent’s marginalia before the clerks noticed.