Registrar of Minor Impressions

The Registrar of Minor Impressions is the office charged with the provisional logging, provisional logging, and where necessary the retrospective un-logging of impressions too faint to be committed to the permanent record in their first instance. The office is distinct from the Registrar of full impressions, from the Grand Registrar, and — a distinction the office has defended formally on four occasions — from the Registrar Maelstrom, whose register concerns vortices and the impressions left by vortices, which are not minor merely because they are brief.

The present Registrar holds Warrant 6,211, issued under Clause 22 of the Registry of Minor Impressions and countersigned by the Scriptorium of Minor Weights, which maintains the Registry and to which the Registrar reports quarterly. The Registrar is assisted by five Tertiary Clerks and one Junior Runner, and occupies the eastern face of Floor 814 between the second and third Minor Stairs.

Origin

The office was created, somewhat against its will, by the sixteenth amendment to the Concordance of Lingering Impressions, which had until then left the weighing of minor impressions to whichever clerk was nearest the residue when it formed. The practice had produced what the amendment's preamble calls "a divergence of scales not consistent with a single archive"; in the winter of that year two clerks on Floor 814 had recorded the same footprint at 3 and at 11 degrees of weight respectively, and neither would yield.

"Where a residue falls below the threshold of permanent inscription, it shall be carried to the Registrar of Minor Impressions, who shall weigh it once and shall not weigh it again."

— Concordance of Lingering Impressions, Annex 9

The clause establishing the office is the same clause that first described the Minor Stair as the reference point for all coordinates on a floor, a decision that has bound every subsequent survey, including the correspondence with the East Floor Survey over the designation of the Spiral of Minor Resolutions — a correspondence the Registrar of Minor Impressions has inherited and is said to keep in a separate box.

Procedure and the M-W/44

Weights are logged using Form M-W/44 and submitted in triplicate; the third copy is the one that is read. Filing is by the Registry's primary taxonomy, in which each impression is entered as a residual motive impression, a minor architectural behavior, or, in the case of the third category, a "residue of undetermined origin, retained against the possibility of origin." The third category accounts for roughly four-fifths of the office's holdings and all of its disputes.

Verification of a minor architectural behavior requires three independent observations logged in the Registry before the entry advances from provisional to settled. In practice the third observer is often the Registrar, a practice confirmed as permissible under Clause 22 but "not admired" by the auditors of the Scriptorium. The Registrar's written reply to that observation, dated to the eleventh quarantine, runs to nine pages and is reproduced in full in the office's own dossier.

Jurisdiction

The Registrar's writ stops at the door of the Atelier of Permanent Impressions, which admits no provisional material of any kind; a clerk who carries an unweighed impression across that threshold is required to leave it with the porter. The Registrar has no authority over the Chamber of Fading Impressions, and the boundary between a fading impression and a minor one is proverbial. The Biographical Register of Minor Functionaries is a separate register and has never been kept by this office, whatever the similarity of title.

The Registrar does correspond at length with the Aperture Registrar on apertures below four feet, and with the Clerk-Registrar of Linear Standards on the recurring question of whether a stair measured on the diagonal is the same stair. The Registrar of Particulate Appeals has declined the question twice.

Points of disagreement

Scholars differ on whether the Registry's numbering is a sequence of entries or a sequence of weighings, since a single impression may be weighed more than once where the first weighing is itself held to be minor. The Concordance of Lingering Impressions Third Revision Spiral 22 adopts the latter view; Annex 9 of the first recension adopts the former. The office observes both and has never been asked to choose.

A second dispute concerns the twenty-two entries logged in the name of Clerk-Registrar Halloway, who signed for the office for four years and whose successor claimed that Halloway's entries bore no impressions at all but had been copied from the entries above and below them as a matter of convenience. The claim was never proved, the entries were never struck, and the office now refers to them collectively as "the Halloway sufficient."

Access

Visiting clerks may consult the open register on any day the floor is lit. They may not bring in their own scales, and must leave the door of the register room as they found it.