Material Receipt (Series M)

The Material Receipt (Series M) is the instrument issued by The Tower for the acknowledgement of physical objects tendered for holding. It is the eldest of the three receipt series maintained under Receipt and Triaging, preceding the Abstract Receipt and the Potential Receipt by an interval the Concordance of Receipts declines to fix. A Material Receipt is issued only against an object that can be weighed, shelved, or struck; where a submission possesses neither mass nor volume, the Triaging clerks are directed to Series A, and where it possesses neither mass nor volume but is expected to, to Series P.

The instrument is not a title. It records that a thing was received, not that it was wanted. This distinction was settled in the Fourth Concordance, Annex 2, and has been relitigated in every subsequent recension.

Form and issue

A Material Receipt is executed in triplicate on laid stock of 90 gsm, sealed at the lower right with the Seal of First Receipt, and countersigned by the receiving clerk and by a second clerk who is required only to confirm that the first clerk exists. One copy accompanies the object to its shelf; one is retained by the receiving desk; the third is dispatched to the Gallery of Unacknowledged Receipts, where it is filed and cross-referenced whether or not the object it describes was ever formally received.

The reverse of the form carries the rubric Condition on Receipt, which admits of four entries: sound, unsound, disputed, and pending. The fourth was added by the Seventh Recension in response to the long dispute over the Bell of the Ninth Landing, which was entered as disputed in 4081, re-entered as pending in 4083, and has not been examined since 4089 out of a general reluctance to touch it.

Objects below the weight of a standard copper tally may be received under the Short Form M-2, which omits the disposition clause and may be completed by a single clerk. The Short Form is not valid for anything that ticks.

Issuance and the problem of withdrawal

Material Receipts are not revoked. An object may be withdrawn from holding, but the receipt of its receipt stands, and the Material Registry continues to list it among current holdings with the marginal notation withdrawn; receipt extant. The Material Registry, Floor 4011 preserves an instructive example: the withdrawal slip for Vernon Lyle's surveying supplies (four chains, one level, eleven stakes) is held under Series M, and the supplies themselves were returned to their borrower in the winter of 4217. Both facts appear on the same shelf, in the same hand, twelve centimetres apart, and neither has been permitted to correct the other.

This arrangement is defended in the Fifth Concordance as preserving the integrity of the record: "A receipt testifies to an event, and an event does not cease upon the departure of what occasioned it" (Fifth Concordance, Annex 9, clause 4). The Keeper of the Ledgers has twice petitioned for a withdrawal series, and twice been refused.

Series M and the Gallery

Unacknowledged Material Receipts accumulate at the Gallery of Unacknowledged Receipts in a proportion that the Gallery's own returns place at roughly one in four. The largest single cause is tendering at a desk not empowered to receive — the Desk of Provisional Entry, Floor 220 most frequently. The second largest is the practice of lodging an object with the receipt attached but the receipt face inward, which renders the acknowledgement unread and the object, in the language of Receipt and Triaging, "present but unspoken for."

The Gallery has never formally objected to this traffic. It has, however, twice moved its intake window.

Scholarly dispute

The principal disagreement concerns whether a Material Receipt may be issued for an object that has not arrived. The Second Concordance, Annex 6, holds that it may not, and that any such document is a Series P issued in error. The Sixth Concordance, Annex 1, holds the opposite: that where an object is certain to arrive, its receipt may precede it, provided the receiving clerk annotates the form held in advance and dispatches all three copies to the Gallery, where they will await the object.

"The receipt is not the shadow of the object but its summons; and a summons may be issued before a man is found."

— Sixth Concordance, Annex 1, clause 2

The Office of Series Reconciliation has ruled on the question eleven times and reached a different conclusion on nine of those occasions. Its current position, dating from the Eighth Recension, is that both Concordances are correct and that the discrepancy is a matter of shelf.

A subordinate dispute concerns the copper tally. The Standards Annex of 3912 fixed it at 4.2 grams; the Standards Annex of 3960 gives 4.35; both are stamped in force. Clerks are advised to use whichever is nearest to hand and to record the choice, as the Quarterly Anomaly Digest has noted that the discrepancy has never once mattered.

Related instruments

The Material Receipt is distinct from the Potential Receipt and from the Abstract Receipt, and no acknowledgement in one series may be read as an acknowledgement in another. A tendering party who has filed a Receipt of Anticipatory Intent has not thereby filed anything for a physical object, and may not collect a Series M receipt on the strength of it, however robust the intent. The Concordance of Receipts, Annex 14, states the rule plainly and adds, without further comment, that this has been tried.

Receipts of all three series are entered in the Scriptorium Supply Ledgers only insofar as the forms themselves consume stock; the ledgers record the paper, not the claims. Requests for the disposal of superseded forms are directed to the Office of Duplicate Instruments, which has not been heard from since the winter of 4203.