Office of the Historiographer

The Office of the Historiographer is the Tower body charged with the continuous written chronicle of specified registries, annexes and sub-basements whose ordinary operational records are judged insufficiently durable to survive their own filing. It was constituted by Amendment 41.2 to the Third Concordance, which created the office of Historiographer Lys and, in the same clause, the secretariat that has since grown up around the title. The Office occupies Rooms 3 through 9 of the Fourth Recess, Upper Corridor Beta, and maintains a further reading room on sub-basement Gamma, which is unheated between the eleventh and second months.

The Office does not keep history. It keeps accounts of history, which are distinct, and the distinction has been litigated. Its instruments are the day-book, the recension register, the marginal objection, and the colophon.

Origin and the Contretemps

The office's founding is inseparable from the dispute over the Lys-Gamma Spiral, a helical descent of some 340 steps whose ownership of record was claimed simultaneously by three custodial bodies and, at one point, by a fourth that had ceased to exist. The dispute ran so long that the Seventh Central Registry could not establish which of its own sub-basements the Spiral terminated in. The Concordance records the resolution with characteristic economy:

"That the Spiral be entered in the Register under a single hand, and that hand answerable to no office presently existing."

— Third Concordance, Amendment 41.2, clause 3

The single hand was Lys, appointed following the Contretemps of the Mis-inked Seal and assigned to a third sub-basement annex of the Seventh Central Registry. The office thus began as one person, one desk and a disputed staircase, and expanded only when the chronicle outgrew the desk.

Method

The Office works by recension. Each day-book entry is copied twice — once as it happened and once as the day-book says it happened — and the two copies are permitted to differ only in ink. Differences in content are entered in the recension register as marginal objections, of which 61,400 are currently open. An objection is closed either by resolution or by the death of the objecting clerk, and the second method is the more frequently cited.

The Office's protocols are coordinated with the Office of Acoustic Stability and the Office of Acoustic Integrity, since it was established during the Year of the Archive 897 that the Spiral returned a different footfall count to a descending party than to an ascending one, and that the chronicle was obliged to record both. Compilation of the Seven Strictures of the Animate Archive, ratified that same year in Annex 3, remains the Office's most frequently mis-shelved product; four copies are held in the reading room and none of them is where the index says.

Conflicts of authority

The Office's authority is documentary rather than administrative, a distinction it has never fully accepted. When the Office of Taxonomical Purgation reclassified a sequence of Gamma annex entries as "unattested, therefore void," the Office refused to strike them and instead recorded the reclassification in the margin, thereby preserving both the entries and the erasure. Catalogic Logistics, to which Purgation reports, upheld the marginal method in a letter of the twelfth month that has since been cited in eleven unrelated disputes.

A longer quarrel concerns the Office of Temporal Modulation, which holds that all chronicles should be dated from the day of writing, and the Office of Chronometric Standards, which holds that they should be dated from the day of the event, and the Office of the Historiographer, which holds that they should be dated from the day the event was first disputed. The Office has dated its own entries by all three methods since Cycle 203 without noting which is in use on any given page.

Holdings and custody

The Office holds the Key of Absent Resonance, a ceremonial instrument requiring a complete set of twenty-seven Tonal Sigils; the set is incomplete by four, and the Key is consequently kept in a velvet sleeve in the third drawer and not carried. The Office also holds the day-books of Sub-basement Gamma from Cycle 198 to the present, the recension registers, and a locked cupboard of withdrawn colophons.

Custody rules are strict in one particular: no chronicler may enter the Spiral carrying a light. The rule derives from an entry of the Year of the Archive 901 in which a descending party's candle was recorded as ascending ahead of them, and the resulting objection has never been closed.

Scholarly disagreement

The principal point of contention is what the Office actually chronicles. The Office of Primary Determinations maintains that the Office records only the Spiral and its immediate annexes, and that all entries concerning the wider Seventh Central Registry were interpolated during the Contretemps of the Mis-inked Seal. Against this, the Office's own preface to the Gamma day-books asserts a general commission over "the Registry entire, its annexes, and such floors as it may hereafter acquire." The Office of Orthodoxy has declined to rule, noting that the office created by the Amendment is described in the third person throughout, so that it is not settled whether the chronicler or the chronicle is the office's subject.

The Office for the Management of Perpetual Affairs has offered the observation — recorded, but not adopted — that both readings may be correct, and has been asked not to repeat it.

Inquiries are received in Room 6, Fourth Recess, on days the corridor is open. Visitors are asked to sign the day-book twice.