Stability Proposal

The Stability Proposal is the collective designation given to the four submissions — formally, proposals of stability, as distinct from the many proposals concerning stability — that were laid before the Librarian-General between the years Y188 and Y204 and that together produced the present law of Stability Certification. The four are catalogued under a single holding number, SP/4, on the ground that they cannot be read apart; the Concordance on Standing Submissions records that "the several stability proposals shall be shelved together, and no one of them cited without the other three" (Concordance on Standing Submissions, Annex 3, clause 7). Where a later writer refers simply to the Stability Proposal, the first of the four is usually meant.

The four submissions

The proposals were lodged over sixteen years by four different offices, each apparently unaware of the others, and then bound together by a bindery error in Y206 that nobody has been willing to undo. They are inventoried as follows:

• SP/1, Y188 — Proposal for the Regular Declaration of Stability of Holdings, submitted by the Office of Measured Holding.
• SP/2, Y193 — Proposal for the Certification of Holdings Prior to Citation, submitted by the Assessor's Bench.
• SP/3, Y199 — Proposal for a Register of Stable Things, submitted by the Guild of the Winding Path through its standing liaison.
• SP/4, Y204 — Proposal for the Rectification of the Foregoing, submitted by the Committee for Prior Instruments after the first three had begun to be applied.

The fourth is the shortest — eleven lines — and has caused more dispute than the other three combined.

Origins: the Selvage question

SP/1 was written in the year the Selvage Proposal was being read in draft, and it borrowed its method openly. Where Hieronymous Selvage had proposed to measure junctures by the gradient of material across them, the Office of Measured Holding proposed to measure holdings the same way: a holding was stable insofar as the claims made for it did not fall away too sharply from the claims its neighbours made for theirs. The Office's registrar at the time, Alverda Thurn, is credited in the margin with the phrase that survived into the certification form — "a holding is as stable as its least contiguous claim." Thurn left the Office in Y190 over an unrelated matter concerning the Register of Contiguous Claims, which she described in her letter of resignation as "a list of things that are next to other things, kept by people who do not go and look."

SP/2 approached the same problem from the bench. It proposed that no holding be cited in any proceeding until an assessor had certified it, and that the certificate be affixed to the citation itself. The Assessor's Bench tested this on a small scale in the winter of Y194, certifying only the holdings cited in the matter of The Forty-One Stairwells. The test collapsed when it emerged that certifying a holding required citing Approval Authority, which was itself uncertified, and that certifying that required citing the original holding. The Bench's minute of 2 Ventôse Y194 records the deadlock in a single line: "the instrument has eaten its tail; suspend."

Consolidation and the binding error

SP/3 added the register, and SP/4 was written to undo it. The Committee for Prior Instruments argued that a register of stable things, once made, would become the thing by which stability was judged, and that this inverted the order of proof: "the register shall not certify the holding; the holding, being certified, shall be entered in the register, and if the register be missing the entry shall be made twice and dated once" (SP/4, clause 6). The clause was intended as a safeguard. It has been read since as a licence to keep two registers, one of which is authoritative and neither of which is complete.

In Y206 the four were sent to the Bindery of the Lower Spiral together with a routine instruction to shelve them within the year. The bindery, working from a docket that listed them as one item, bound them as one volume. The Sub-Librarian for Corrective Rebinding, Osric Pell, applied three times to have the volume cut apart and three times was refused, the third refusal citing the binding itself as evidence that the proposals were "of a single instrument and must not be severed" (refusal of 9 Floréal Y209). Pell's marginal note on the third refusal — "then let the instrument be read as it was written, in four hands" — is preserved in the volume's flyleaf and is the only surviving comment by a binder on the matter.

Relation to the certification regime

The four proposals in combination are the textual basis of Stability Certification. They are not, however, the basis of Geometric Stability, which is assessed by other means and by other officers; the Geometric Stethoscope is not used in certification proceedings and its readings are not admissible in them. The distinction is maintained by the Catalogical Stability tribunals, which hear disputes over Geometric Stability and which have twice declined jurisdiction over certification disputes on the ground that those belong to the ordinary assessors.

The proposals also stand at some distance from the Proposal for Unified Chamber Theory, whose meta-doctrinal apparatus assumes that all stability questions can be reduced to chamber-state; SP/1 explicitly disclaims this, noting that "a holding is not a chamber, and a chamber that has been made a holding is no longer a chamber but a floor" (SP/1, clause 14).

Scholarly dispute

The Concordance of Amended Procedure and the Third Concordance disagree on whether SP/4 was ever validly submitted. The Third Concordance, Annex 2, holds that any proposal filed after the instrument it amends has received first reading is "of no effect until re-entered," and SP/4 was filed in Y204 against SP/1 of Y188. The Concordance of Amended Procedure, clause 41, holds instead that a rectifying proposal is effective from the date of its own receipt and that "the earlier instrument shall be treated as having always contained the rectification, however belated."

"The rectification is not an amendment to the proposal; it is the proposal as it should have been written, and the archive is in error in recording it separately."

— Concordance of Amended Procedure, clause 41

The practical consequence is that on one reading the certification regime has been rectified since Y204, and on the other it has been unrectified since Y204 and only appears rectified because the rectification has been shelved with the thing it rectifies. The Committee for Prior Instruments has declined to resolve the question, observing in its minute of 14 Thermidor Y211 that "the proposal is stable; the dispute about the proposal is not, and we do not certify disputes."

Visitors wishing to consult SP/4 must request it by the holding number of SP/1, and may not have the volume unbound.