Manual of Essential Inspection

Scope and standing

The Manual of Essential Inspection is the governing instrument for access to the Vault of Unanswered Questions, and the document from which most modern inspection rites derive their authority. It is held on the shelf immediately adjoining the Register of Essential Objects and, by long convention, is consulted before that Register rather than after it — a sequencing which the Fourth Concordance affirms and the Twelfth Concordance disputes at some length. The Manual is not, by its own account, a manual. Its preface states that it "records what is already done, and does not instruct," a formulation which has permitted three separate offices to declare themselves exempt from its provisions on the grounds that they do nothing of the kind.

Structure

The Manual comprises fourteen sections, of which four are operative and ten are preparatory. The preparatory sections concern the reader: posture, hour, and the state of the hands. Section IX, on the state of the hands, is the most cited clause in the entire document, though it is generally cited in support of propositions it does not contain. The operative sections are:

• Section II — the qualification of an object as essential
• Section V — the conduct of an inspector in the presence of an essential object
• Section X — the recording of findings, in the manner described by the Manual of Transcription Standards
• Section XIV — access to the Vault

Section XIV is brief. It states that the Vault is opened by an inspector who is satisfied, and that satisfaction, once recorded, is final. No provision exists for the withdrawal of satisfaction, though the Bureau of Contradictory Inspection has twice attempted to record one.

The Inspection Cadre

The Manual empowers the Inspection Cadre to bypass its own access protocols, a clause which has never been satisfactorily explained. The clause appears in Section XIV under the heading "Notwithstanding," with no antecedent. Early recensions of the Manual omit it entirely; it first appears in the recension commissioned during the tenure of the Librarian-Regent of contiguous jurisdiction, and its provenance is disputed. Under Edict of Inspection 7, a Cadre assembled for this purpose must number at least nine, and must include an Indexer where heretical archives are involved. The Manual predates the Edict and does not recognise the Indexer as an office. Cadres assembled under the Edict therefore work in a document that does not describe them, a condition which the Concordance of Standing Objections classifies as "regular."

Relation to the Registers

The Manual and the Register of Essential Contiguities are maintained by different offices and are not reconciled on any fixed schedule. The Register asserts in Recension 3 that "density adheres to the record and not the thing recorded"; the Manual's Section II assumes the opposite, defining essentiality by a weight that the object is observed to carry. The Inspection Cadre, auditing the Register, has noted the resultant discrepancy in the case of the Noumenal Hygrometer, described as "essential in both senses and operative in neither." Ordinance 711-B later narrowed the qualifying test for contiguity from "invariable co-occurrence" to "co-occurrence under inspection," a change which brought the Register closer to the Manual's position without, as the Bureau of Contradictory Inspection observed, obliging either document to say so.

Amendments and disputes

The Manual has been amended eleven times. Amendments three, seven, and nine were subsequently withdrawn; amendment seven remains in circulation in two versions, and both are quoted in the Concordance of that designation as though they were the same text. A standing disagreement exists between the offices of the Nine Concordant Guilds as to whether the Manual's preparatory sections are binding on clerks performing transcription only. The scriptorium on floor 1222 holds that they are not, on the grounds that a clerk's hands are engaged rather than presented. The adjoining floor, 1219, holds that they are, and has posted a notice requiring inspectors to wash before entry. Both floors cite the Manual; neither cites the same clause. Visitors are reminded that the Manual may be read at the shelf but not carried from the room in which it is shelved.