Pre-emptive Inscription

Pre-emptive Inscription is the practice of entering a subject in the Tower's registers before the subject has been presented for entry. It is authorized by the Eleventh Concordance and is the operative mechanism by which the Tower catalogues what has not yet arrived. The practice is administratively distinct from Pre-emptive Audition, which concerns sound, and from Pre-emptive Schematic Drafting, which concerns diagrams of holdings that have not been built; together the three constitute what the Eleventh Concordance calls "the anticipatory apparatus of the archive." Under Clause 2 of that document, no subject may be inscribed pre-emptively except under the authority of the Eleventh Librarian, to whom the practice is subordinate in every particular.

The procedure is superficially simple and administratively bottomless. A clerk of the Great Ledger of Potentialities receives a Notice of Impending Subject — the standard form is the N.I.S.-4, revised at the Beta stairwell in the winter of 411 — and enters the subject's name, floor of probable accession, and estimated hour of arrival. The subject is thereby catalogued. Should it later present itself, the entry is confirmed and the ink is permitted to dry. Should it not present itself, the entry stands regardless, since the Eleventh Concordance requires only that inscription occur at the moment of inscription.

Origin and the Eleventh Librarian

The practice is generally credited to the Eleventh Librarian, whose tenure on the Ninth Spiral is dated by the seal-register to the years 388–447. The Concordance does not record the Librarian's reasoning; the customary account, drawn from the Recension of the Southern Scriptorium and repeated without attribution in three later handbooks, holds that a subject pre-emptively inscribed cannot later enter the Tower unannounced, and that a catalogue which cannot be surprised is a catalogue at rest.

The Office of the Provisional Census was established within the same decade to argue that if some potentialities could be inscribed before arrival, all of them could, and that a comprehensive ledger of everything that might ever arrive would render the Tower's work complete. The office was dissolved in 402 without its ledger being closed. Its papers were folded into the Great Ledger of Potentialities, which has since reabsorbed its authority entirely, and Tier 2 of the Ledger remains administratively downstream of that dissolution to this day.

The Scriptorium dispute

For eleven years the Scriptorium and the Scriptorial Collegium argued over whether pre-emptive inscription constituted a form of audition, and therefore fell to be reviewed by an Oval of Audition, or a form of drafting, and therefore fell to be checked against its own schematic. The Scriptorium maintained that a name written in anticipation is a sound heard early. The Collegium maintained that it is a drawing made late. Neither would yield, and for the whole of that period inscriptions were entered twice — once under Pre-emptive Audition and once under Pre-emptive Schematic Drafting — a duplication the Bureau of Pre-emptive Records still cites in its standing complaint against the Great Ledger of Potentialities.

The argument was settled by the Eleventh Concordance itself, which formally joined the two practices and closed the question. Clerks of the older school note that the Concordance joined the practices without deciding which they were, and that the eleven years were therefore ended rather than resolved.

Relation to quarantine and clearance

Pre-emptive inscription does not confer clearance. An inscribed subject is held pending Pre-Clearance Scrutiny and may be subject to the Doctrine of Predictive Quarantine, under which a holding is isolated before it has had the opportunity to be found objectionable. Nor does inscription supply an index entry; the Pre-Conditional Index must be consulted separately, and its entries do not always agree with the Ledger. Where the two conflict, Clause 5 governs, though the clause is silent on what governing consists of.

"The subject shall be written before it is met, and met as though it had been written, and the writing shall not be revised on meeting."

— Eleventh Concordance, Annex 6, clause 2

Disputed cases

The most contested inscription in the practice's history is that of The Hum of Anticipated Rain, entered at the Gamma aperture in the spring of 389 and confirmed, by most accounts, eleven days before the rain in question was heard. The Bureau of Pre-emptive Records argues from a surviving provisional budget schedule that the confirmation was backdated, and that the Hum was in fact inscribed after the fact and afterwards presented as pre-emptive. The Bureau's argument is not accepted by the Oval of Audition, which has declined to reopen the file four times.

A lesser dispute concerns the so-called Sigh of Archivist Kappa, transcribed at the Delta landing in 433. The Bureau maintains that the Sigh was deliberate and therefore a subject properly subject to inscription; the Scriptorial Collegium maintains that a sigh is not a subject but an interval, and that its inscription was a clerical error since formalized into precedent.

Objections and the category question

Concordance 22, Clause 3 provides that things pre-emptively inscribed are real within the Tower, and that questions as to their reality outside it are not to be raised in writing. The clause has been read strictly. When the Office of the Provisional Census attempted in 399 to survey the exterior standing of its unarrived subjects, the survey forms were impounded and the office's registrar reassigned to the Beta stairwell, where he remained for the rest of his service.

The practice also requires that the ink used in the Great Ledger of Potentialities be permitted to dry for no less than a full watch before the volume is closed, a rule traceable to the smudging of the winter of 411 and enforced without exception since.