Seventh Concordance Document

The Seventh Concordance Document is the working style under which the Seventh Concordance is held, shelved, and cited within the Seventh Spiral Administrative Spire. The name refers not to a single text — the Concordance itself is composed of a founding body, some forty-one annexes, and an accretion of amendments that no one has counted twice in the same decade — but to the physical and procedural arrangement by which that text is permitted to be consulted. In the Document style, each annex is bound separately, each amendment is filed according to the annex it alters rather than the date of its passage, and no sheet may be removed from its quire for any purpose, including correction of an error on that sheet.

The style was fixed by Seventh Concordance Revision 4 and has not been revised since. It is distinguished from the loose-leaf style of the Forty-Seventh Concordance and from the continuous-roll style still maintained on the lower floors for documents of the Thirty-Seventh family.

Origin and rationale

The Document style arose from the Partial Survey of the Seventh Concordance, mandated under the Concordance itself in the winter of the year the Spire's north stair was closed for regrouting. The survey found that of the amendments then in force, a majority had been filed against the wrong annex at least once, and eleven had been filed against annexes that did not exist. The compilers concluded that a document consulted by its amendments could not be verified; a document consulted by its annexes could be verified annex by annex and the remainder left honestly unknown.

The rationale is stated in the Survey's summary sheet:

"An annex knows what belongs to it. An amendment knows only what it was written against, which is frequently a guess. Bind the annex; let the amendment be found where the annex sends it."

— Partial Survey of the Seventh Concordance, Summary Sheet 3

Physical specification

Under the Document style the Seventh Concordance occupies 214 quires, each of seventy-two leaves, in boards of pressed stair-felt covered with the grey linen reserved to documents of the first rank. Quires are numbered in Roman numerals on the spine; annexes are lettered, amendments are numbered in Arabic, and the two sequences are kept deliberately out of step so that no reader may infer the age of an amendment from its position. Annex Gamma of the Seventh Concordance sits at quire CXI; Annex Gamma 7 of the Seventh Concordance at quire CXII; Seventh Concordance, Annex Theta at quire CLXX. The Annex of Foundational Epistemics is bound last, at quire CCXIV, and is the only quire permitted to contain blank leaves.

The bindery's standing instruction, posted at the door of the third bindery and observed without comment, is that quires are to be sewn with unbleached linen and never with silk, as silk has been found to hold a crease and so to preserve the appearance of having been consulted more often than it was.

Consultation and custody

Readers do not request the Document. They request an annex, and the annex is brought. If the reader's business concerns an amendment, the attendant first brings the parent annex, and the reader is expected to locate the amendment through the annex's own marginal directions. This is the central inconvenience of the style and its principal defence: a reader who cannot find the amendment is understood to have misunderstood the annex, and is sent back to the annex until the misunderstanding resolves or is referred to the Desk of Lateral Correspondence.

Custody rests with the Scriptorians of the Seventh Aperture, who codify, interpret, and transcribe amendments from the Document but may not rebind it. A dispute of 1,204 between the Scriptorians and the Measurer-Scribes over whether a detached leaf in quire XCIX constituted a repair or an alteration was settled by reference to Amendment 47, which had itself been filed against the wrong annex and could not be produced for eleven days. By the time it was produced, the leaf had been reattached and the dispute had become one about whether the reattachment was admissible. It was ruled admissible. The leaf remains in place.

Disputed questions

The order of the annexes

Commentaries on the Seventh Concordance hold, on the authority of quire order, that the annexes are to be read in the sequence in which they are bound, and that the letters are labels of convenience only. Against this, the annex on ventilation and circulation is cited by several later commentators as evidence that the binding order was disturbed during the regrouting and never restored. No survey since the first has examined the spines directly, the first having been conducted before the regrouting.

Whether the Document is the Concordance

The Concordanceseventh Concordance maintains that the Document is the Concordance, the text existing only in its arrangement. The Scriptorians of the Seventh Aperture maintain the opposite, that the arrangement is a vessel and the text a content, and that a misplaced amendment is misplaced only in the vessel. The Seventh Supplemental Accord to the Concordance of Provisional Realities takes no position but notes that both parties have at various times relied on Concordance 892 to support whichever view was convenient.

Annex B

Annex B is a subsidiary document to the Seventh Concordance and is not bound with it, a circumstance that the Document style neither explains nor authorises. It is held at the Desk of Lateral Correspondence in a separate folder. Requests for it are honoured, but readers are asked to state whether they want Annex B or the annex following A, and to say the letter aloud.

Later use

The Document style has been adopted, in whole or in part, by the Annex D working group and by the Seventh Revision Concordancetwelfth on grounds the latter has never stated. Proposals under Annex Q may not directly contradict the foundational text, and the Question of whether the style is foundational or merely procedural has been referred to the Seventh Spiral Administrative Spire on four occasions and returned each time without a ruling.

Floor 9,010, categorised under Intermittent Infrastructure, holds a duplicate set in the loose-leaf style for the use of parties who have lost patience with the annexes. The duplicate is incomplete from quire CLXX onward. No reader has complained.