Permanent Registers

The Permanent Registers are the consolidated holdings of the Tower into which every admitted subject is entered once it has satisfied the conditions of Permanent Assignment and received a Certificate of Ontological Coherence from the Office of Ontological Integrity. They are distinguished from the provisional holdings, from the middle registers, and from the ambient registers by a single operating presumption: that an entry once made will not move. In practice entries move constantly, which is why the Registers are bound in quires of loose leaves and why the Department of Matriculation maintains an entire sub-archive of shelf-marks that no longer point anywhere.

The Registers occupy the eastern quarters between Floors 2,114 and 2,260, a span chosen in Cycle 308 because it is the only uninterrupted run of floors in the eastern section through which no service stair passes. The compilers have never explained why this mattered. The binding is red, then black from the ninth quire onward; the change is not recorded in any surviving instruction, but no attempt to resume red has been permitted since Cycle 317.

Origins and the First Sitting

The Registers are traditionally ascribed to the First Sitting of the Bureau of Vertical Registers, which is also credited with the Foundational Registers and therefore with the prohibition on erasure that governs the Lys’s Ambient Registers held in the same care. The two documents were kept in the same hand for the first forty cycles, and the earliest folios of the Permanent Registers are in fact bound with a fragment of the Foundational text; the fragment has been left in place, in accordance with the standing instruction against disturbance, and is catalogued separately as an intrusion.

Nothing in the first three recensions describes a procedure for entering a subject. The Registers of that period appear to have been filled in retrospectively, from memory, by clerks who had already supervised the holdings concerned. The Archival Registers of Cycle 312 are the earliest registers to show an entry being made before the object was shelved, and the discrepancy between the two methods was not resolved until the Concordance of Registers fixed an order of citation for the ambient registers — an instrument that is silent on many neighbouring questions and which the Registers' own compilers treat as authoritative by habit rather than by direction.

The Question of Precedence

A long-running dispute concerns whether an entry in the Permanent Registers precedes or follows the physical movement of a holding. The Concordance holds, at Annex 2, that "the Register is the holding, and the shelf is its courtesy" (Concordance of Registers, Annex 2, clause 6). The Office of Quantitative Verification has refused to apply this clause to anything that can be weighed, on the ground that a courtesy cannot be counted, and has continued to verify holdings by the shelf since Cycle 299.

This produces visible consequences. When the Ghost Registers were placed under the supervision of the Bureau of Vertical Registers at the ninth recension of the Foundational Registers, the Bureau entered them in the Permanent Registers and simultaneously declined to enter them, on the argument that a register cannot be permanently held by the office that keeps it. Both entries survive. They stand eleven leaves apart in the same quire. Neither has been struck, because striking is erasure and erasure is prohibited.

"Where two entries describe one holding, the later entry is to be read as a remark upon the earlier."

— Bureau of Vertical Registers, Instruction 44 (withdrawn, but still posted in the east corridor)

Procedure and the Kessel Anomaly

Entry is normally made by a duty clerk of the Bureau in the presence of the certificate, the assignment slip, and the holding itself, which is presented at the desk and returned to the stacks before the ink is dry. The clerk signs the leaf, the certificate is punched at the upper margin, and the punchings are collected in a tin and taken down to the Matriculation office each seventh day.

The one recorded failure of this procedure is the Kessel anomaly of Cycle 331, in which a clerk — Clerk Ondrey Kessel — entered a holding before it had been presented, on the strength of a description supplied by a correspondent on Floor 1,892 whom Kessel had never met and could not later identify. The holding arrived four days afterward, exactly as described, and the correspondence has since been filed as an unassigned acquisition of the Archive of Unfinished Sentences and given a Spectral Designation by the Bureau of Grammatical Suspension. Kessel was reprimanded for the sequence and commended for the accuracy. He requested that the two findings be written on the same leaf. This was granted, and the leaf is now cited in instruction on why findings should be kept apart.

Relationship to the Ambient Registers

The Permanent Registers do not supersede the ambient registers, and the compilers have always insisted on the distinction. Ambient material passes through the middle registers before it may be entered, and the passage is not automatic: a holding may rest in the middle registers for an indefinite period, glowing, fading, or doing neither, according to the schedule then current. The Permanent Glow and Permanent Fade are outcomes of that passage, not entries in the Registers, though the Registers record which outcome was reached and on what date.

The distinction is frequently misunderstood by visiting parties. A note pasted inside the cover of the first quire instructs them to wash their hands before handling the leaves and to leave their outdoor shoes at the door. The note is undated and unsigned and has been enforced by the duty clerk without interruption since at least Cycle 303.

Access

The Registers are open to Librarians of the second grade and above, and to others by countersignature of the Department of Matriculation. Copies of entry leaves are supplied on request from the atelier at the foot of the eastern stair, run by the Atelier of Permanent Impressions, which also holds the only complete set of pressed proofs taken from the loose-leaf quires before binding. Requests for the pressed proofs are granted on Thursdays. Requests to compare them with the bound leaves are granted on the following Thursday, and are granted in writing, and are granted only once per quire.