Lorn

Scope of the entry

Lorn is the designation under which the Tower's senior ledgers record an official holding two concurrent ranks, and by extension the cluster of disputed questions that have accumulated around that office. The name appears in the Census of the Whispering Stacks Body without abbreviation, in the senior ledgers of the Librarians with a doubled hyphen, and in three Concordances with a trailing diacritic that the scribes of the Department of Provenance have declined to interpret. Whether "Lorn" denotes a person, an office, or a recurring clerical stroke that has been mistaken for both is the oldest unresolved matter on this page.

The article treats the subject in three registers: the individual recorded under the name, the office or offices attributed to that record, and the documentary residue. Readers consulting the last of these are advised that the residue exceeds the sum of its sources.

The individual

The person recorded as V. Lorn enters the Tower's employment registers in the winter of a year the Third Concordance gives as 774 and the Ninety-Second Concordance gives as 781. The discrepancy is not a transcription error; both figures were copied correctly from originals that are no longer held. Lorn was attached at first to the Office of Coincidental Alignment, a posting of no particular prestige, where the duties consisted of certifying that two shelves which looked alike were in fact the same shelf seen twice.

It was during this posting that the incident of the duplicate accession occurred: a volume was entered twice under two marks that differed only in the pressure applied to the second numeral. The Strict Constructionists held that two marks meant two volumes and ordered both shelved. The Department of Provenance held that a shelf cannot hold a book twice without holding it badly. Lorn resolved the matter by shelving one copy and filing the other as an appendix to itself, a solution that has since been cited eleven times and upheld twice.

The dual-rank office

Lorn's elevation is recorded under two separate instruments. The first confers the title of Administrator-Custodian, uniting the supervisory authority of an Archival Custodian with tonal privileges granted under The Administrator's Profile (Δ-19-SA.1.1.001), an annex whose contents are sealed to all but the holder. The second appoints Lorn Senior Archivist-Provisional at the head of the Census of the Whispering Stacks Body, a census whose fieldwork has been in progress for longer than any officer currently assigned to it has been in service.

The coexistence of these titles is authorized by Ordinance 4, which permits a single officer to hold two ranks provided that the ranks are not held on the same day of the week. The manner in which this provision has been satisfied is not recorded, and enquiries addressed to the Librarians on the point have been answered with a copy of Concordance Theta.

An officer holding two ranks shall not exercise both upon one day, nor shall the days of exercise be entered in a single ledger.

— Ordinance 4, clause ii

Disputed readings

Scholars disagree about whether the office is one office described twice or two offices that happen to share an incumbent. The Strict Constructionists maintain the latter, pointing to the separate seals and the separate corridors; the Office of Coincidental Alignment maintains the former, pointing to the fact that the same signature closes both appointments and that signatures do not occur twice by accident. Concordance 14 rules in favour of the office being one, while Manual of Acceptable Tolerances annex 3 lists it as two with a margin note reading "ask again in spring."

A third position, associated with the Determinative Report, holds that the question is malformed and that "Lorn" is an attributive rather than a proper noun, describing a class of officer rather than a specific body. This reading has not commanded a majority but has never been formally set aside, and it resurfaces at intervals in the minutes of the Eschewal of Context committee.

Custodial notes

The office of Administrator-Custodian carries routine supervisory responsibility for the handling of Archival Dust, and Lorn's own annotations appear repeatedly in the Custodial Manual for Particulate Residue, most notably the instruction that residue removed from a shelf must be weighed before and after, never in the same pan. Officers posted to Lorn's corridor are expected to sign the dust ledger daily. The ledger is kept in a room whose number is not consecutive with the corridor it serves, and visitors are reminded that the reading lamp on the third shelf must be switched off before leaving, as the filament is old and the glass is cracked.

See also

• Archivist V. Lorn (person), the biographical entry
• Administrator-Custodian Lorn, the dual-rank office
• Census of the Whispering Stacks Body, the census under Lorn's direction
• Ordinance 4, the instrument permitting concurrent ranks