Reader of the Afterword

The Reader of the Afterword is a standing office of the Tower charged with the reading, dating, and where necessary the sealing of all matter appended after the formal close of a text — colophons, terminal glosses, post-scripta, and the loose slips pressed into bindings after the binder has signed. The office is among the oldest in continuous operation, predating the Office of the First Reader by an estimated four centuries, and it is unique among reading offices in that its incumbent is not required to read the body of any work. The Reader of the Afterword reads only what comes after. The distinction is maintained with some severity: during the tenure of the ninth Reader, a clerk who summarized a main text in order to make sense of its afterword was reassigned to the sorting of unclaimed bookmarks and did not return.

Origin and the Coda Ordinances

The office was constituted in the wake of the Coda Ordinances, a set of instructions on the closing of documents issued in the years before the Concordances were consolidated. The Ordinances stipulated, among other things, that no book might be considered closed until its afterword had been read by a person who had not read the book. The reason given in the Ordinance's preamble is procedural rather than scholarly — the Board of Concordant Arbitration had found itself unable to rule on disputes about a book's ending when every party to the dispute had already formed a view of the whole — and the arrangement has never been revisited. Over time the prohibition hardened into custom, and custom into a badge of office. Readers of the Afterword are addressed as Reader, never as Reader of the Whole, and the error is corrected once and thereafter noted in the floor register.

The first Reader of record is named in a colophon on the Binding of the Ninth Cento as simply "the reader who comes last." Three later recensions supply a name, a floor, and a date of appointment, and none of the three agree.

The Valen Axiom and the question of the unclosed text

The office's relation to the Valen Axiom is a matter of enduring friction. The Axiom, established by First Reader Valen in her ruling on Annex B of The Seventy-Seventh Clarification, holds that a text is complete when its reader is — that is, that closure is a property of reading and not of the page. Read strictly, the Axiom would make the Reader of the Afterword's work impossible, since the afterword is closed only when its reader finishes and therefore has no fixed place at which it may be sealed. The office's response, set down in the Counter-Annex of 6301 and never formally withdrawn, is that the Axiom concerns readers of texts and the Reader of the Afterword is not, strictly speaking, a reader of a text at all.

"The Reader of the Afterword is a witness to closure, not a party to it. The office stands beside the book until the book is shut, and then records that it was shut."

— Counter-Annex of 6301, clause 6

First Reader Valen is not recorded as having responded to the Counter-Annex, and the silence is sometimes cited in the Tower as evidence of assent and sometimes as evidence of patience. Both readings are current. The Board of Concordant Arbitration has declined on four occasions to settle the matter, most recently on the grounds that any ruling would itself require an afterword and that the Board had no Reader of the Afterword available that session.

Procedure and the Mark of Station

The working instrument of the office is not a pen but a reading stand, and the office keeps its own small calibration set. Where a document's afterword is to be sealed, the Reader applies the Mark of Station, a wax round bearing the number of the floor on which the sealing takes place. The depth of impression matters. Under the Standing Instructions on Sealing, a mark shall not exceed one line's breadth of the page, and it is the practice of the office to verify this with a Mark VII Volumetric Spool-Reader, which reads the depth of impression and not the image — a distinction the office insists upon, since the image may be reproduced and the depth may not.

Because the Mark VII Volumetric Spool-Reader held at the Courtyard of Errant Premises was decommissioned in 1941 and no replacement was issued to the office, the Reader of the Afterword now borrows the instrument from Volumetric Stabilization on a standing loan, three floors at a time. The loan is recorded in a ledger at the bottom of the fourth flight, and the ledger is kept in pencil. Readers have been known to defend the pencil on archival grounds.

The Cassiline dispute

A lasting disagreement concerns whether the office's authority extends to a second afterword. Reader Cassiline of the Ninth Landing introduced the Doctrine of the Second Reading in 1633, holding that any text read once must be read again by a different reader, and the question was immediately raised whether a Reader of the Afterword who reads an afterword twice ceases to be the Reader of the Afterword and must be replaced by a Reader of the Second Afterword. No such office was ever constituted. The office nevertheless maintains a small sealed chamber off the Ninth Landing in which a replacement, should one be required, might wait — and it has been maintained, swept, and warmed every winter since 1634, and has never once been used.

Against the Cassiline reading, the Open Commentary tradition argues that a second reading of an afterword is not a second afterword, and that the office is therefore safe; against that, the Literalist Person has observed that the Doctrine nowhere distinguishes between a text and its tail, and that the distinction is one the office has made for its own convenience. The Literalist Person's note on the subject is two lines long and is kept in the office's own file, which is unusual, and is regarded by the office as a compliment.

Notable incidents

The best known failure of the office occurred during the Incident of the Uncounted Reader, when an afterword was read by a person whose name could not afterwards be established, with the consequence that the cession of the Midnight Interval was recorded without a sealing reader's mark and had to be re-executed eleven years later. The First Reader of the day ruled that the re-execution was valid, and the ruling has been cited in every dispute about incomplete seals since.

The office's inventory of working materials, revised at each change of incumbent, is short enough to be reproduced in full.

• one reading stand, adjustable, of uncertain manufacture
• one box of sealing wax, red, issued in 4471 and not since replenished
• the borrowed Mark VII Volumetric Spool-Reader, when it is on the floor
• a pencil

The wax box is empty. The office has continued to seal with it, and the seals have continued to set, and no explanation has been offered in writing. The matter is not discussed at the Office of the First Reader, where the current Reader of the Afterword is, by long arrangement, never required to appear in person.