Re: The Phantom Annex to the Eleventh Concordance

The Disputed Phantom Annex to the Eleventh Concordance is the designation given in the Tower's finding aids to a document that has been cited in formal pleadings since at least the winter of the year recorded as 4,112 by the Long Stair count, but which no Librarian has produced, examined, or held. It is referred to in the reading rooms as the Phantom Annex, or, in the fuller style affected by the Vault Legal office, "the Annex to the Eleventh that answers to no letter." The name is not a courtesy. It is a filing convention, and a contested one.

Origin and first citation

The Annex first appears in the record in a marginal cross-reference appended to Eleventh Concordance, Annex M, where a later hand has written: "see the Annex to this Concordance, which is held in suspension." The phrase is untidy. Eleventh Concordance, Annex M itself states that an annex bearing a terminal designation is "held in suspension," by which the Eleventh Concordance plainly means annexes lettered to an end of the alphabet and not annexes that cannot be found. Whether the marginal note invokes that rule deliberately or merely borrows its language has occupied the Committee on Annex Numbering for the better part of two generations.

The first formal citation is more securely dated. In a dispute over the custody of a quantity of Phantom Vellum, counsel for the Directorate cited "the Annex to the Eleventh Concordance, unlettered and unnumbered, as sealed under Annex 2." The presiding Librarian asked to see the document. It was not produced. The citation was struck, and the matter proceeded on other grounds.

The problem of the terminal designation

Much of the difficulty is terminological. The Eleventh Concordance already contains annexes lettered Gamma, Sigma, M, and an Arabic 9, and the conventions governing each are recorded elsewhere: Eleventh Concordance, Annex Γ carries clauses 41–58 and governs the Aural Lacunae Archive; Eleventh Concordance, Annex Sigma houses the doctrine of deferred correction; Annex 9 governs Scale Breeding and the draft matter process on Floor 407. None of these is terminal in the sense that Eleventh Concordance, Annex M uses the word.

A document with no letter at all, however, may be described as terminal by exhaustion — it terminates the alphabet by standing outside it. This reading was advanced by the archivist Second Class Orvin Masp in a memorandum of 4,118 and has never been formally adopted or formally rejected. Masp's memorandum carries the note, in a different hand, that the question should be put to him in person, and that he was then on a stairwell expedition and not expected to return before the matter resolved itself.

Relationship to the phantom document classes

The Seventh Concordance defines the class of Phantom Appendices and traditionally maintains them within its Annex Delta. Phantom Appendices are, by definition, documents that exist in the record and not in the stacks; they are cited, catalogued, and bound in Phantom Vellum in ink of the formula fixed by the Third, Annex 4, which also designated the Phantom Sheep.

The Phantom Annex is not a Phantom Appendix, and this distinction has been the source of considerable friction. The Seventh Concordance classes appendices; it says nothing of annexes. The Eleventh Concordance, which says a great deal of annexes, nowhere acknowledges that a phantom class of annexes exists. The Phantom Annex therefore falls in the gap between two documents, each of which declines jurisdiction over it. Documentary phantoms of the ordinary kind may at least be measured; the Phantom Annex has resisted even a description of its extent.

The measurement attempts

Three attempts to establish the Annex's physical parameters are on record. The first, undertaken in 4,121 under the authority of the Directorate, employed a Phantom Thermometry Scale and a Phantom Thermometer borrowed from the Phantom Imprints collection. The instrument registered nothing, which the technicians recorded as a successful null reading; the Committee later held that an instrument borrowed from another collection cannot give evidence about a document in this one.

The second attempt used a Phantom Clock to determine whether the Annex had duration — that is, whether it was still being written. The clock ran for nine days without a reading and was returned to its shelf. The third attempt was a survey of the reading rooms, on the theory that a document cited so often must somewhere have been seen. Sixty-one citations were traced. None led to a sighting. The searchers reported that the citations referred to one another "in a manner not unlike a chain of stairs."

The chief searcher, a clerk of the reading room named Ilsa Vann, submitted a dissenting note arguing that the Annex was being generated by the citations themselves and would cease to exist if the parties stopped citing it. Her note was filed. It has not been answered. She has continued to submit it annually.

Continuing citation and the suspension

Despite three failures of production, the Phantom Annex continues to be cited, principally in disputes where no other annex will serve. Vault Legal treats citation as licit provided the citing party appends the words "held in suspension" to the reference, a practice that has spread to other offices and now appears in documents having nothing to do with the Annex at all.

The Clause VII dispute of 4,127 turned on whether a suspended document could be amended. The Committee held, by a narrow margin, that it could not, since amendment presupposes a text, and a text presupposes a document, and the document had not been produced. The dissent observed that the Committee had thereby held the Annex to be immune from amendment by reason of its own non-existence, which the dissent described as "a most durable form of protection."

"Where an annex is held in suspension, no instrument of correction may be laid against it; and if the annex cannot be found, this is because suspension operates upon the finder as well as the found."

— Deferred correction, as applied to the Phantom Annex by Vault Legal in its opinion of 4,129

Copies of the Annex are not to be removed from the reading room. Visitors wishing to consult it should apply at the desk on Floor 449, where the Bureau will record the request and, in the ordinary course, decline it.