Manual of Reluctant Holdings

The Manual of Reluctant Holdings is the standing instruction of the Tower governing the recognition, registration, and accommodation of holdings that decline to be held. It is issued in loose-leaf recensions from the Office of Reluctant Holdings, Fourth Spiral, and its current authorized text runs to 611 leaves, of which 44 are themselves reluctant and are stored separately. The Manual is distinct from the Manual of Reluctant Handling, which concerns the physical handling of resistant materials; the division between the two is stated in the Manual's own preamble as "the division between what will not be picked up and what will not be put down" (Manual of Reluctant Holdings, Preamble, clause 2).

The Manual is answerable to the Bureau of Reluctant Holdings and is cited in matters of Catalogical Refusal more often than any document except the Register of Reluctant Chairs.

Scope and the definition of reluctance

The Manual defines a reluctant holding as any catalogued object that "returns, withdraws, or otherwise declines the act of holding without declining the act of being held" (clause 7). The distinction is fine and has been litigated. A codex that slides from the shelf when reached for is reluctant; a codex that cannot be located at all is absent, and falls under the Manual of Silent Procedure. A chair that will not be sat in is reluctant, and is entered in the Register of Reluctant Chairs; a chair that will not be sat in and will not be moved either is entered twice, once in each register, a duplication the Guild of Sentient Furnishings has protested since 1188 without effect.

Reluctance is graded on a scale of one to nine, the Scale of Withheld Assent, with grade one denoting a slight lag in the retrieval mechanism and grade nine denoting a holding that has, in the words of the Manual, "withdrawn its consent to be described" (clause 19). Holdings at grade nine are not described in the Manual's own text; the relevant leaves are blank and are counted among the reluctant 44.

Chapter 9 and the Refusal of Proxy

Chapter 9, "Refusals of Proxy", is the Manual's most cited and least followed chapter. A Refusal of Proxy occurs when a holding consents to be held by a named Librarian but not by that Librarian's designate. The Manual sets out a three-day interval for the holding to reconsider, after which the designation is void and the original Librarian must attend in person or the holding is recorded as unheld.

Chapter 9 was invoked at length in the winter of 1341, when the Fifth Spiral Reading Room was closed for eleven weeks because a single atlas declined every proxy offered to it and the Librarian of record, Under-Librarian Vess, was snowbound below Floor 2,208. The Manual's interval was extended four times by Concordance 44 and once reduced by Concordance 51, which the Office has never reconciled. The atlas was eventually collected by Vess in person and has since declined three further proxies, each at the permitted intervals.

"A proxy is not a substitute for a presence, and the holding is the judge of the presence."

— Manual of Reluctant Holdings, Chapter 9, clause 4

The question of consent and the Recension of 1291

Whether a reluctant holding can be said to consent to anything is disputed. The Recension of 1291 holds that reluctance is a property of the holding and not an act of will, and that the Manual is therefore a manual of accommodation rather than of negotiation. The rival Recension of 1402, which the Office has never formally withdrawn, holds that reluctance is a species of refusal, that a refusal presupposes a will, and that the Manual ought properly to be titled a manual of dissent. The two recensions differ in seventeen clauses, six of which concern the correct form of address to a holding of grade five or above.

The Standing Committee on Catalogical Refusal has declined to resolve the matter for sixty-one sessions, on the ground that a ruling either way would require the Committee to establish whether it too could be refused. The Committee's own minutes are recorded as reluctant on this point.

Procedure and the refusal of the Manual itself

The Manual directs that every reluctant holding be approached by two Librarians, one holding the register and one holding nothing, so that the holding may decline the one without declining the other. Approaches are logged in the Ledger of Declined Approaches, which has been kept without interruption since 1023 and is the Tower's most reliable record of anything. Where a holding declines both Librarians, the Manual advises that the approach be repeated at the next bell and no more than four times in a day. Holdings that decline the fourth approach are entered in the Schedule of Settled Refusals and left alone.

The Manual is itself a reluctant holding. Its 44 separate leaves are stored in a locked case in the Fourth Spiral and decline to be read in the presence of more than one Librarian. The Office has ruled that this is consistent with the Manual's own provisions and that the case is not to be opened on a Tuesday.

Amendments and current standing

The Manual has been amended 212 times, most recently by the Amendment of the Ninth Leaf, which corrected a cross-reference in Chapter 12 that had pointed to the Manual of Coherent Cataloguing since 1174. The correction was itself corrected in the following year, and the erroneous reference is now retained in the text with a note explaining that it is retained. The note is one of the 44 reluctant leaves.

Copies of the Manual are held at the Scriptorium of the Fourth Spiral, in the Ephemeral Annex (a fragmentary recension, incomplete), and in the Closed Stacks, Floor 2,208, where the copy is recorded as grade four and must be requested by name.