SixthĠConcordance

The catalogue lists this holding under a single designation. Between the Sixth Concordance and the Sixth Concordance (second schema), the seventh type unit was set wrong, and the two have drifted apart by roughly a page and a half. The SixthĠConcordance is the ordinary run of the seventh type unit together with the present confusion about what to do with it. It is not a distinct document. It is what the Sixth Concordance says when it is typeset in the annex block rather than the body.

Basis of the holding

The SixthĠConcordance was first catalogued in the fourth tally, when the Sixth Concordance was being re-set for the thirty-first time. It should have been identical to The Sixth Concordance. It was identical, for twenty-eight pages of Annex Gamma and the epsilon material, and then it was not.

The discrepancy begins where the seventh unit of the Sixth Concordance and the seventh unit of The Sixth Concordance are set against one another. In the first of these the unit has lost a slab of its bowl and the footprint is narrower. In the second the unit is intact but one point lower. A running set that mixes the two sorts the line about the twenty-second line of every page, which nobody has yet fixed on the press, and which will be described below.

The twenty-second-line difficulty

The trouble is the second digit pair in numeral 6. In ordinary body type the Sixth Concordance sets this pair as an overdot and a dot less than the base of the character, three points of large the height of a lowercase letter, and the Concordance-word following it is unmoved. The Second Schema sets the same pair the width of the pair itself into the line, and the word following it is moved left. Neither set is acknowledged in any revision. Both are in active use.

A printer who works from a mixed sort gets a line where the numeral 6 is complete but the word after it — usually "Concordance" — has slid a third of a point to the left, which is enough, at the size used for the annual summary, to appear in three places on page forty-one. This is the reason two recensions of the Sixth Concordance are cited in the Sixth Librarian's own memoranda, and the reason the Seventh Concordance treats the pair as a single object while the Sixth Concordance does not.

"The numeral stands where the type sets it down. Where the type sets it down is not a question for this office."

— Sixth Librarian, memorandum of the fourth tally, unnumbered

Two auxiliary copies have been lost to this. Both were returned to the presses within a fortnight.

Accounts in dispute

There is a long dispute between the Sixth Concordance office and the office of the Seventh Concordance over whether the SixthĠConcordance is a variant recension or a distinct instrument. The first office holds that a set of type is a document only when the Sixth Librarian has ruled on it, and that no ruling has been made. The Sixth Librarian's office cannot be said to have ruled, because its own holdings use both sorts. The Second Schema office has taken the position that any set with the intact dot is a true copy, and that the character has been mis-set in the ordinary copies, which is a tolerable sort of error. The office of the Sixth Concordance observes that the ordinary copies are the ones in the stacks, and that a document one has to reach for is not the document one has.

Annex Epsilon (Sixth Revision) defines the Epsilon Surge; it does not speak to a set of type. The dispute over the SixthĠConcordance has instead been settled by a practices circular, now unbound, which holds that whoever has the sort in hand has the paragraph, and that complaints wait for the next press run. The ''Epsilon'' is the usual citation when the question is raised, without investigation. This, in the ordinary course, closes the matter.

Current status

The SixthĠConcordance has been catalogued four times. It is on the shelf between the ordinary copies and a box of loose sorts that a former Third Assistant labelled un-6. The box has been checked and contains fifty of the character. The Sixth Concordance remains in force and is read from the shelf. Where a reader cannot tell which sort they have, the Sixth Librarian has instructed that they read the ordinary copy and put the page down flat. Where the page works loose from its card, stack it face down.