Librarian Tertius

Librarian Tertius is a designation of the Librarian Order, held in succession by no fewer than four recorded persons and, by one contested account, by a stairwell. The designation carries with it custody of the Treatise on Proximate Nullities and the documentary class known as Order Tertius, and is unique among Librarian ranks in that it is not conferred on a living candidate but assigned retrospectively, usually some years after the holder has ceased to require it.

The office is administered from a reading room on the third spiral, a chamber eleven paces by four whose eastern wall is occupied entirely by the shelves of the Order Tertius collection and whose western wall has been described in survey returns as "load-bearing, and also Tertius." Correspondence about the designation should be addressed to the room, not the incumbent.

The designation and its conferral

Unlike the ranks delineated in the Librarian Progression Ordinances, Tertius is not a step on any ladder. Junior Librarians do not aspire to it; Librarians of the Third Order are frequently confused with it and this confusion is the single largest source of misdirected post in the archive. The distinction was set out by Librarian Althea in a memorandum to the Librarian-Proctor in the winter of the year recorded as 4,112 by the internal reckoning, in which she observed that a Librarian of the Third Order is a person who has attained a rank, whereas Tertius is a rank that has attained a person.

Conferral is made by the Over Librarian on the recommendation of the Senior Librarian for Particulate Taxonomies, and requires only that the candidate have produced a work of sufficient nullity that its absence from the catalogue would not be noticed for a period of not less than forty years. The First Librarian is notified as a courtesy. Three of the four recorded holders were notified of their own appointment posthumously, which the Ordinances permit and the holders have not contested.

The Treatise and the custody dispute

The designation's principal charge is the Treatise on Proximate Nullities, the foundational text on adjacency among unrealities. Custody of the Treatise is not the same as authorship of it, though the two are perpetually conflated in citation. The Contradiction Librarian maintains, on the authority of a marginal note in the second recension, that the Treatise was not written by any Tertius at all but assembled by the room itself over an undocumented interval; the note reads, in full:

"The hand is not the hand of the office. The office writes. Cease asking after the hand."

— marginal note, second recension of the Treatise on Proximate Nullities, folio 3 verso

This position is not accepted by the Office of Material Coherence, which has ruled twice that a room cannot hold a designation, and once, in an annex now withdrawn, that it can hold a designation but cannot sign for it. The Third Concordance is silent on the matter. The Ninth Librarian's Expedition carried a copy of the Treatise for the stated purpose of settling the question and returned without it, which Librarian Provisional Arris recorded as "inconclusive, and lighter."

The four holders

Only the first of the holders is documented in any continuous way. Tertius-Primus is known from three receipts. Tertius-Secunda is known from a single correction slip pasted into a bound inventory, which she signed and then, apparently reconsidering, initialled. Tertius-Tertius is known from a dispute over a window.

The substance of that dispute survives in the Declaration of Procedural Anomaly, which classifies the Tertius designation under a category of self-modifying processes on the ground that the office's records alter between consultations. A consultation conducted in the spring of 4,388 returned four holders; the same consultation, repeated eleven days later by the same clerk, returned three, and the clerk's own name among them.

Disagreement among the Concordances

The Fifth Concordance, Annex 2, holds that the designation lapses upon the death of the holder and must be reconferred. The Seventh Concordance, Annex 9, holds that the designation does not lapse at all, death being a condition the Concordance does not recognise as affecting office. Both annexes are in force. The practical resolution, adopted without recorded objection, is that the designation is treated as lapsed for the purposes of ceremony and un-lapsed for the purposes of the shelving.

A third position, advanced by the Librarian-Taxonomist in a paper read to the assembled Order and never printed, proposes that Tertius is not a designation but a floor, and that the four holders are the four landings of a stairwell on which the Order has been conducting its business in the mistaken belief that it is conducting it in a room. The paper was shelved, in both senses.

Practical notes

Consultation of the Order Tertius collection requires a written request countersigned by two Librarians of the Fourth Order or one of the Third. The room is not heated between the eleventh and the twenty-ninth of any month with an R in it, the pipes being shared with the floor above, which has prior claim. Visitors are asked not to address the eastern wall directly. Requests left on the reading desk are collected on the fourth day; requests left on the western wall are collected, and this is discouraged.