Library of Unwritten Prefaces

The Library of Unwritten Prefaces is a reading collection of 41,600 volumes, none of which contains a preface, maintained on Floor 1,144-C under the joint administration of the Scriptorium of the Unwritten Preface and the Archive of Unwritten Prefaces. It is the only collection in the Tower whose holdings are defined by absence rather than by content: a volume is admitted to the Library when the preface it was to have carried has been separately catalogued elsewhere, and the volume itself has been returned to the shelves with the front matter excised. The Library therefore holds no prefaces and is not permitted to. Its readers come to consult the books without them.

Founding and the Removal of 1,144-C

The Library was constituted by Concordance 88, which ordered that "prefatory matter, being separable, shall be separated" and assigned the resulting volumes to a floor then used for the storage of surplus endpapers. The removal took eleven years. Clerks worked shelf by shelf, lifting each preface out whole where possible and in sections where the stitching resisted, and forwarding the results to Sub-Level 909-A. The volumes that remained were stamped on the inside front board with the date of their removal and the initials of the clerk responsible.

Disagreement persists over whether the Library was founded in the year the Concordance was sealed or the year the removal concluded. The Office of Floor Dating holds for the former; the Bureau of Separated Matter for the latter, on the grounds that a library of absent prefaces cannot be said to exist until the last preface has left it. Both positions are cited in the Library's own accession register, which lists two founding dates on facing pages and declines to choose between them.

Arrangement

Volumes are shelved by the length of the preface they no longer contain, measured in leaves at the time of removal and recorded on the removal stamp. The sequence runs from the shortest — a single leaf, removed from a devotional tract on Floor 1,144-C itself — to the longest, a preface of 214 leaves taken from a volume whose remaining text occupies nine pages. The disproportion is not considered remarkable. Concordance 88, Annex 6, states that "the preface and the book are of different orders and are not to be weighed against one another."

Within each length class, volumes are ordered by the date of removal, and within each date by the height of the surviving spine. A reader seeking a particular book is advised to know its preface's length in advance. The Library maintains a reading room of forty desks and a separate room, unlit and unstaffed, in which the removal stamps may be consulted by those who have already consulted them.

The Theobold Question

The Library's relation to the Echoes of Unwritten Prefaces has been disputed since 1,203, when the Theobold Commission was asked to determine whether a volume stripped of its preface continues to echo. The Commission found, by a majority of four to three, that the echo resides in the preface and departs with it, and that the Library is therefore silent. The minority held that the echo resides in the book's expectation of a preface, which the removal intensifies rather than dispels.

"A book that has been deprived of its preface is not a book made quiet. It is a book made expectant, and expectation is the loudest thing in any room."

— Dissenting opinion of Librarian Ossa Vane, Theobold Commission, 1,203

The majority finding governs. Readers are nonetheless reminded by notice at the door that the reading room is a silent one, and that the silence is administrative rather than acoustic. In practice the distinction is not observable, and the Wardens of the Reading Rooms have declined to enforce it since the winter of 1,207, when a reader on Desk 19 was cautioned for humming and could not be shown to have hummed anything.

Relation to the Archive and the Gallery

The Library is administratively distinct from the Archive of Unwritten Prefaces but draws its removals from it, and the two offices have never agreed on the direction of the relationship. The Archive describes the Library as a receiving station; the Library describes the Archive as a depository for its discards. Buffer Sigma-7 separates the two, and correspondence between them is carried by hand and logged at both ends.

The Library is not contiguous with the Gallery of Unwritten Prefaces, and a proposal of 1,198 to connect them by corridor was refused by the Concordance Office on the grounds that the Gallery is ontologically distinct and a corridor would imply otherwise. The Chamber of Reversed Prefaces has twice requested transfer of the Library's removal stamps for comparison with its own holdings; both requests were granted, and both consignments were returned unopened with a note stating that the stamps had been compared.

Access and Incidents

The Library is open to holders of a Reading Warrant endorsed for absent matter. Volumes may be borrowed for fourteen days, provided the borrower signs a declaration that the preface was not consulted in the course of reading. Food is not permitted, and umbrellas must be left in the stand by the stair.

The most serious incident in the Library's record occurred in 1,211, when a clerk of the Bureau of Separated Matter was found to have reinserted a preface into its volume in order to consult it more conveniently. The volume was withdrawn, the preface returned to Sub-Level 909-A, and the clerk reassigned to the Well of Unspoken Prefaces, where he is recorded as having been content. The shelf mark he disturbed remains vacant, and the vacancy is catalogued as a holding.

Acquisitions continue at a rate of roughly ninety volumes a year, drawn chiefly from the Archive of Withdrawn Prefaces and from volumes whose prefaces have been transferred to the Vault of Unwritten Prefaces for reasons the Vault does not disclose. The Library does not solicit donations and asks that prospective donors not describe what they are donating.