Register of Essential Objects

The Register of Essential Objects is a standing inventory maintained on Floor 1,714 under the joint seal of the Precedent Register and the Standing Register of Established Objects, listing those items which the Tower holds to be objects in themselves rather than objects of something else. It is not to be confused with its more extensive neighbour, The Register of Essential Contiguities, which records what adheres to objects; the Register of Essential Objects records only what is left once all adherence has been stripped away. As of the most recent audit by the Inspection Cadre, the Register comprises 11,204 entries, of which 9,880 are described as "provisionally essential" and the remainder as "essential pending objection."

Origin and early recensions

The Register was opened on the third day of the 9,414th fiscal reckoning, some three winters after The Register of Essential Contiguities, on the finding of the Precedent Register that "a contiguity of sufficient age acquires an object at its centre" (Precedent Register, Ruling 411-C, margin note). The first Recension, comprising nine entries, was compiled by the clerk Ovella Marrant, who is credited in the preamble with the formula that governs the Register to this day: the object is that which remains when the record is consulted twice and returns the same answer.

Marrant's formula was tested almost immediately. In the winter of the 9,416th reckoning a dispute arose over a lacquered box on Floor 1,716 which, on first consultation, was recorded as a box, and on second consultation, was recorded as a lid. The Botanical Register was consulted, since the box had been used to store specimens, and its clerks declined jurisdiction, observing that the specimens had since been shelved apart from one another by the operation of Ordinance 711-B. The box was entered in the Register under protest and remains there under the designation Ob. 47 (provisional).

Relation to the Essential Contiguities

The two Registers are frequently cited against one another, and the resulting disputes occupy a disproportionate share of the Vigil Register's marginalia. The doctrine of essential form, as restated in Recension 3 of The Register of Essential Contiguities, holds that "density adheres to the record and not the thing recorded." Clerks of the Register of Essential Objects have treated this as licence to describe objects entirely by their entries, a practice the Register of Irregular Acquisitions has formally deprecated on the grounds that it renders physical provenance unclassifiable — a grievance that office has raised at every joint sitting since the 9,428th reckoning, to no effect.

The practical consequence is well illustrated by the case of the Noumenal Hygrometer, which appears in the Register of Essential Objects at Ob. 2,109 and in The Register of Essential Contiguities at Cont. 8,441. Neither entry describes the instrument's dial, which is broken. A note appended by the Inspection Cadre in the 9,433rd reckoning records that "the instrument is essential in both senses and operative in neither."

The Marrant-Ghast Inquiry

In the 9,441st reckoning the Librarian Corbin Ghast petitioned the Precedent Register to strike every entry from the Register that could not be produced on demand, on the reasoning that an object which cannot be produced is indistinguishable from the record of it. The petition was granted in part by Ruling CV-1202, which held that entries may remain provided their production is deferred rather than refused. Some 6,300 entries were accordingly marked deferred, and a schedule of production was drawn up for the following three centuries.

Marrant's heirs — a phrase the Register uses without further explanation — objected that deferral is a fiction no different from refusal, and that the ruling had converted the Register into "a promise of an inventory rather than an inventory" (Marrant, Memorial to the Standing Register, 9,443rd reckoning, f. 12r). The Standing Register declined to hear the objection on the grounds that it had been properly filed.

Conflict of reading

Scholarly opinion is divided as to whether the Register records objects or merely records that something has been recorded. The Third Concordance, Annex 9, requires that every entry be read alongside its earliest recension, which is to say literally; The Fifth Concordance, Annex 2, forbids this, on the ground that the earliest recension of any entry is "an opinion held before the object was established." Both annexes remain in force. The Master Index resolves the contradiction by listing each entry twice under adjacent headings, a solution the Nine Concordant Guilds have twice condemned and twice adopted.

Use, audit, and current practice

The Register is consulted most often by clerks of the Register of Probable Holdings, who require an entry's essential status before a probable holding may be raised to a provisional one. Consultation proceeds by Circulation Ledger Gamma, through which requests travel upward and answers downward, a round trip averaging four months. Entries that have not been consulted within eleven years are transferred to the Ledger of Partial Acquisitions and replaced by a blank leaf bearing the entry number.

Under the Manual of Essential Inspection, the Register itself may not be removed from Floor 1,714, nor may any object listed in it be carried up a stairwell in the same satchel as its entry. The Cadre's most recent audit found 41 breaches of the latter provision, all of them on the same afternoon, all of them clerical, and none of them prosecuted.

The Register is presently open in Recension 19 and has not been closed since its opening. Requests for its closure are entered in the Register of Probable Holdings under heading Pending.