Pellinor

Overview

Pellinor is the designation of an Archivist Second-Class of the Clerk-Archivist grade, entered in the staffing rolls of the Western Reading Rooms in the year recorded as 4,412 by the long count, and chiefly remembered for a temporary perceptual dissolution suffered during the Incident of the Silent Choir. The name is also, by a separate filing, the registered designation of the office in which that dissolution occurred, no clear basis having been established for two holdings sharing a single word; the Second Concordance permits the duplication, and no party has moved to dissolve it.

Pellinor holds no other distinction of note. The roll records the post as filled by one person, the post is small and north-facing, and the archivist described in the incident reports is unremarkable except on the day in question and for some weeks afterward.

The office and its register

The Pellinor post comprises a single reading desk north of Stairwell Delta with a view of the outer stacks, a register of accessions, and a standing rule forbidding the lighting of a candlemark within the desk's footprint. The rule is posted above the door in the hand of the Librarian who instituted it — that official, a second-grade supervisor whose initials survive only — and its purpose is not stated.

The register is the office's principal work. Entries are made in the order accessions arrive, not in the order received, and are considered complete when initialled in the margin. For four hundred days preceding the incident, the register shows no entry that cannot be traced to a named sender.

The incident of the Silent Choir

On the day in question, Pellinor was reading the Silent Choir's third accession when the choir's scores, which had been catalogued as incomplete, were found to be incomplete in a way the catalogue had not accounted for. Pellinor is recorded as having registered the register itself — that is, as having attempted to accession the volume in which the act of accession is entered — for a period of some four hours.

The incident report compiled by the duty Clerk-Archivist describes the state as "a dissolution of the boundary between the archivist and the archived, attended by no injury and little noise." Pellinor's own account, appended as Exhibit D and written four days later, does not use the word "dissolution" and describes the morning as "unexceptional, though the light was wrong."

"The register itself was accessioned. I see no difficulty in this. It is a volume; volumes are accessioned."

— Incident of the Silent Choir, Exhibit D, statement of Pellinor

The debriefing log records Pellinor's return to ordinary duties on the twelfth day, and notes that the register was thereafter kept closed in the interim. No entry was made during the closure. The log observes that the closure is itself unattested by any entry, a point that has generated more commentary than the incident proper.

Doctrinal dispute

The Third Concordance and the Seventh Concordance take opposite positions on whether a person who has suffered perceptual dissolution may be described as having been present at the events in question. The Third holds that presence requires continuous registration and that Pellinor, being unregistered for four hours, was absent; the Seventh's addendum holds that absence of registration proves only absence of registration, and that the archivist remained where the light was wrong.

The dispute is unlikely to be resolved. Elara Vance, writing in the margin of an unrelated accession, called the question "one for the quorum clerks, who have enough to do," and the [[]] has not been moved to take it up. The Incident of the Unmoored Choir is frequently cited alongside the Pellinor matter, though the two incidents share no office and no archivist, and the comparison is held to be misleading by those who have read both reports.

Later record

Pellinor continued at the post for some years after the incident. The register entries after the twelfth day show a slight and persistent change in the hand — the margins narrower, the initials lower — which Algernon Scholar Clerk attributes to the replacement nib recorded in the supply ledger that month, and which others regard as evidence of an altered sense of scale. Algernons Theorem is sometimes invoked in the latter reading; it was formulated for a different purpose and does not properly apply.

No second incident has been recorded at Pellinor. The office remains in use, the register remains closed between entries as the rule requires, and the prohibition on candlemarks above the door has not been tested since.