Provisional Texts

Provisional Texts are written works admitted to the Tower's holdings before the question of their completion has been settled. A text is provisional when it exists, is legible, and is catalogued, but has not yet been found to be whole; it occupies shelf space, receives a floor number, and may be consulted by any Librarian in good standing, while its status as a finished work remains undetermined. The category is among the oldest in the archive and among the least stable, since a Provisional Text may remain so for centuries without any apparent deficiency being identified, and several have done so.

Provisional holdings are administered jointly by the Department of Implied Texts and the Transcription Corps, an arrangement set out in the Third Concordance and later narrowed by Concordance 41. Disputes over the status of individual items are heard by the Recalibration Office on Floor 62.

Origin and early rulings

The category was created by the Twelfth Concordance, Clause 9, in response to the notorious case of the Ascending Grammar, a volume which added a page each time it was read and therefore could never be certified complete without being read, and could not be certified complete without being read. The Clause permitted such works to be shelved "under seal of provisionality, to be consulted without prejudice to their eventual settlement" (Twelfth Concordance, Clause 9). Settlement has not yet occurred.

Early interpretation was generous. Under Conditional Authority as it was then construed, a Provisional Text could be cited in proceedings so long as the citing party appended the designation provisional in the margin, in red, at the head of each page so cited. The practice fell into disuse in the winter of the year recorded as 3,904 after the founding of the Hall of Foundational Texts, when a dispute over a water-right turned on forty-one pages of marginal annotations and the Bindery of the Third Recess refused to remove the red ink without an order it was not empowered to receive.

The Substantialist controversy

The most sustained disagreement in the literature concerns whether provisionality is a property of texts or of the record of texts. The Substantialists, who coalesced during the tenure of Curator-in-Chief Elara at the Department of Implied Texts, held that a Provisional Text is in fact a complete text that has been imperfectly catalogued, and that the deficiency lies entirely with the catalogue entry. The opposing school, the Accretionists, held that a text under seal is genuinely unfinished and that cataloguing it as provisional is the only accurate description available.

The dispute is generally dated to the Substantialist Memorandum of the following year, and it has never been formally resolved; the Formal Declaration of Irreconcilability names it as one of the outstanding matters over which the Tower declines to rule. A practical consequence survives: catalogue entries for Provisional Texts are written in the present tense throughout, which both schools accept, for different reasons.

Symmetry and Provisional Wholeness

Under Ordinance 23.Δ, texts demonstrating high Symmetry scores are granted Provisional Wholeness status, exempting them from standard completion mandates. The measure was intended to relieve the examination offices of the burden of certifying works whose internal structure was already self-evidently regular, but it produced an unexpected difficulty: a text of high symmetry may be manifestly incomplete and still be exempt from completion, so that the more regular a work's construction, the less pressure exists to finish it.

The Symmetry Board records that the highest score yet assigned to a provisional holding is 0.98, to the Ledger of Symmetrical Omissions, which consists of a single blank leaf folded in eight. The Board has twice declined to rule on whether the leaf should be unfolded.

Known provisional holdings

The Register of Provisional Holdings, kept on Floor 44, lists roughly nine hundred items, of which the following are most frequently consulted:

• The Ascending Grammar (Floor 29), unsettled since its admission.
• The Ledger of Symmetrical Omissions (Floor 44, Case 12).
• The Unfinished Bestiary of Ovida Sarn (Floor 51), of which eleven folios are missing and catalogued as missing.
• Concordance 74, held provisionally pending collation and consulted only by leave of the Purist Scribes.
• The Seventh Register of Stairwells, shelved under provisionality although its author is recorded as having considered it finished.

Visitors consulting a provisional holding are asked to return the volume to the trolley rather than the shelf.

Disputes and the limits of citation

The Eighth Concordance, Annex 2, forbids the citation of any provisional holding in a document of Class C or above without the countersignature of a Librarian of the Third Grade, a rule that Class C codices themselves are exempt from, since they are collated before ratification and cannot wait upon countersignature. The exemption has generated its own body of case law, chiefly the ruling in the matter of the Quietude Ordinances, where a provisional text was cited in a ratified codex and the citation was held valid because the codex had not yet been ratified at the time of citation and was therefore, in the words of the ruling, "provisional in the only sense that matters" (Recalibration Office, ruling of the 3rd of March). The Purist Scribes have never accepted this reasoning.

Disputes of this kind are entered in the Register of Vacated Texts when a citation is later withdrawn, on the understanding that a withdrawn citation may be said to have been unsaid, and that the page on which it appeared remains present but no longer says it. The Register's keepers observe that no Provisional Text has ever been removed from it, since no Provisional Text, by definition, has ever been finished enough to be vacated.