Protocol 12-C

Protocol 12-C is a documentary instrument of the Archival Protocol series, issued in the ninth recension of the Concordance of Minor Instruments and revised eleven times between its promulgation and the present year. It is chiefly remembered not for its content but for its stationery: Protocol 12-C is the only protocol in the archive whose master copy is bound in grey board, and the Bureau of Binding has twice declined to explain why. It operates alongside Protocol 12-B, from which it is administratively inseparable and with which it is not, strictly speaking, on speaking terms.

Content and numbering drift

Protocol 12-C comprises four clauses, of which the fourth has been vacant since the Third Recension Committee struck it in a dispute over the classification of blank paper. The instrument's purpose is to set the interval at which contemporaneous protocols may be cited against one another without requiring a fresh attestation — the so-called citation horizon. The horizon is fixed at nineteen floors, measured vertically, though the floor-counting convention is disputed (see below).

Clause 2 of Protocol 12-C is the operative clause and is now understood to be misnumbered. In its original form it carried the designation 12-C/3, and the error is preserved because the Office of Recensions has ruled that correcting a misnumbering constitutes a new instrument rather than an amendment. The result is that Protocol 12-C contains no clause 3, two references to itself as 12-C/3, and a marginal gloss by the Registrar Ilsabet Vurn reading, in full: "It is 2. Leave it." Subsequent protocols have adopted the misnumbering as precedent, on the reasoning that if 12-C could survive it, so could they.

Relation to Protocol 12-B

Protocol 12-C was drafted to supplement Protocol 12-B, which governs the attestation of instruments crossing between floors whose numbers do not admit a common divisor. Where 12-B is silent — as it is on any floor bearing a prime above 200 — Protocol 12-C applies by default. The two instruments have nonetheless diverged sharply. The Concordance of Attestation, Article 7, holds that "no protocol shall be read in preference to its neighbour" (Concordance of Attestation, Art. 7, cited in Protocol 12-B, Annex 2). The Fourth Concordance, Annex 11, holds the opposite in terms so nearly identical that the Division of Precedent & Protocol has described the two provisions as "a single sentence wearing two seals" (Division Minute 4,118, filed under Protocol Inquests).

The practical consequence is that a floor may cite 12-C where 12-B fails, and 12-B where 12-C fails, and never both, and never neither, and the choice is recorded on a slip which is then lost. The Protocol Embedment desk maintains a standing instruction that the slip be duplicated. It has never been duplicated.

The counting dispute

The citation horizon of nineteen floors is ambiguous because Protocol 12-C does not state whether the floor on which the citing instrument is issued counts as the first. The Librarians' Standing Orders on Measurement, Order 44, counts it; the Concordance of Ascents, Art. 3, does not. The discrepancy has produced two rival horizons, of nineteen and twenty floors respectively, and a border in the northern stairwells where an instrument issued on one floor can be valid, stale, and valid again within the space of a single landing.

"The floor of issuance is the first floor, unless the floor of issuance is a library, in which case it is the second, unless it is also the first, in which case the Librarian present shall decide and shall not record the decision."

— Concordance of Ascents, Art. 3, as amended

Whether a stairwell landing constitutes a floor for these purposes remains open. The Committee on Vertical Jurisdiction has deferred the question four times, most recently on the grounds that the chair could not be found.

Criticism and the Vurn objection

Registrar Vurn's objection, delivered to the Office of Recensions in the winter of the year the eastern stacks were re-shelved, argued that Protocol 12-C is not an instrument at all but a note about instruments, and that its citation horizon therefore binds no one. The objection was overruled without reasons, as is customary, but it has been reprinted in every subsequent digest of the protocol and is now longer than the protocol. The College of Recensionists teaches it as an example of a defeated argument that has outlived its victor; the College of Sealwrights teaches it as a warning against grey board.

In practice the objection is invoked by any office wishing to ignore the horizon, and Protocol 12-C is accordingly both universally in force and universally suspended, sometimes in the same corridor. A visiting reader may consult the master copy only by appointment, and must not lean on the binding.

Filing

The master copy of Protocol 12-C is held in the Third Annex under seal, alongside Protocol 13-A and the earlier draft of Protocol 17-B Trigger. Two recensions are missing from the sequence; the Office of Recensions records them as "lent", a description it has used continuously for sixty-one years. The protocol's Selvage Protocol notation has never been completed, and the Division of Precedent & Protocol has ruled that it need not be, on the ground that 12-C is adjacent to itself and therefore requires no selvedge.