Petitionary Submission

Petitionary Submission is the formal act by which a grievance, appeal, or request is rendered admissible to the Tower's routing apparatus. It is distinguished from Submission generally — which governs the entry of almost anything into the record — by its requirement that the petitioner state an injury, and by its insistence that the statement of injury survive the journey to the reader intact. The office concerned with that survival is the Bureau of Intact Intent, whose seal appears on every admitted petition and on rather fewer delivered ones.

The practice is old enough that its founding is recorded only as an absence: the earliest registers of the Lower Reading Room contain columns for petitions received and columns for petitions submitted, and the two columns are not reconciled anywhere before the eleventh quire. Librarians have traditionally read this silence as evidence that the distinction was once obvious, and have been trying to restore the obviousness ever since.

Relation to Petitionary Routing

Petitionary Submission is the act; Petitionary Routing is the conveyance that follows it. The two are frequently conflated, a conflation the Concordance of Petitions condemns in one annex and commits in the next. Under the standard reading, a petition is submissible before it is routable, and routable only if its submission was proper; but the same Concordance elsewhere assigns spiral numbers at the moment of acceptance, which would make routing prior to submission.

"No petition shall be assigned a spiral until it has been submitted; and no petition shall be submitted until its spiral is known, lest it be submitted to the wrong desk."

— Concordance of Petitions, Annex 9, clause 2

The clause has never been repealed. The Office of First Receipt resolves the difficulty by stamping petitions twice and dating neither stamp, a practice upheld in the ruling on the Matter of the Twice-Stamped Widow.

The Prescribed Form

A valid Petitionary Submission requires three elements: a statement of injury, a statement of the remedy sought, and a statement of the desk at which the petitioner believes the injury originated. Where the third is disputed, the petition is nonetheless accepted, and the dispute is entered as a separate and usually longer document.

Petitioners frequently err in using Form DRS-44a: Submission of Personal Sentiment for Official Consideration, which resembles the petitionary form closely enough that the two were printed on adjacent presses for sixty years. Sentiment submitted in place of injury is returned without prejudice and, by custom, without comment. The Bureau of Intact Intent maintains that no returned petition has ever been opened on return, and that the custom is therefore unverifiable and should be left alone.

Where the injury cannot be stated without naming an office, the petition is submitted under the Provisional Sigil until the naming is resolved. Petitions that name more than one office are submitted in triplicate under the arrangements described at Submission in Triplicate, though the triplicate requirement is held by some to apply only to reproductions of the form and not to the injury itself.

Refusal and the Record of Refusal

A refused Petitionary Submission is not destroyed. It is docketed under Findings and Reconciliation and conveyed, without the petitioner, to the Echo Archive, where discarded petitionary records are tempered into Echo-Glass for the production of Class Gamma Echoes. The Bureau describes this as a second readership. Petitioners are informed of the transfer by a notice that does not say where the petition has gone, on the reasoning that a petitioner who knew would submit again.

The most cited refusal is that of Clerk Adelma Voss, who in the winter of the lower twelfth circuit submitted the same petition nine times, each time amending only the date, in order to establish that refusal was consistent. The ninth was accepted, on the ground that the date had been amended. Voss's subsequent complaint concerning the acceptance was refused. Her complaint concerning the refusal of the complaint is still open, and is the oldest open Petitionary Submission in the Tower at forty-one years.

Disputed Duration

Scholars disagree whether submission is instantaneous or durative. The Third Concordance, Annex B, treats a petition as submitted from the moment of first receipt, which would make the spiral assignment subsequent and the routing dependent; the Concordance of Petitions treats submission as complete only on the return of the counterfoil. Under the first reading, a petition lost in the Stairwell of Diminishing Returns was submitted; under the second, it never was, and no record of it need exist.

The Office of the Cartographer-Archivist has declined to rule, noting that a ruling would require measuring the interval between receipt and counterfoil, and that its measurement of the Subbasement of Unanswerable Petitions was prohibited for related reasons. In practice the office keeps a count of pending submissions that has never fallen below four thousand and has never been audited.

Practical Notes

Petitioners are reminded that the counterfoil is the only proof of submission, that it must be retained in original and not copied, and that the Bureau will not accept a copy of a counterfoil as evidence that a counterfoil existed. The Desk of Lateral Correspondence receives approximately two hundred counterfoil disputes annually and has upheld eleven.

Ink must be dark. Petitions submitted in pencil are accepted, routed in full, and at the close of routing are found to be blank; the phenomenon is well attested, is not considered remarkable, and is recorded in the Register of Faded Submissions without further explanation.