The Aris Folio

The Aris Folio is a bound codex of sixty-one leaves held in the Ambulatory Collection of the Thirty-Fourth Landing, catalogued as Document 2-R, and is notable chiefly for the fact that no two Librarians agree on who wrote it, when, or whether it is one document at all. It is not to be confused with any of the several other holdings bearing the name Aris, a confusion which has occupied the Registry of Persons intermittently since 1897 and which the Registry has formally declined to resolve.

Description

The Folio measures nineteen centimetres by twenty-six, is bound in undyed calf over boards of pressed reed, and bears on its front pastedown the accession stamp of the Ambulatory Collection together with the numeral 2-R and the sigil of the Fourth Recension. Its sixty-one leaves carry three distinct hands. The first hand occupies leaves 1 through 40 and is confident, upright, and heavily abbreviated in the manner of the Western Stack scriptoria. The second hand occupies leaves 41 through 58, is left-sloping, and annotates the first in the margins rather than continuing it. The third hand appears on leaves 59 through 61 and consists of a single inventory, undated, of eleven items, of which nine are no longer held.

The Folio is legible throughout. This is itself unusual, and is the reason the Folio has been opened more often than most documents of its age, with predictable wear to the gutter of the fourth gathering.

Attribution and the question of authorship

Four candidates for authorship have been advanced in writing. The first is Aris Kettleman, Sub-Librarian, on the strength of the abbreviating hand and the Folio's appearance in the evidentiary annex to his work on The Blank Folio. The second is Aris of the West Stack, whose Reflections on Procedural Purity is quoted twice in the second hand. The third is Steward Aris of the Fourth Recension, on grounds now considered weak. The fourth is a corporate candidate: the Folio is held by some to be the work of a scriptorium rather than a person, and "Aris" to be a formulary prefix attached to documents produced under the tenure of a particular prefect rather than a personal name at all.

The fourth position, advanced most fully by the archivist Elara Vorn in her survey of the annotated holdings, has the merit of explaining the three hands without requiring three authors. It has the demerit of explaining rather more than the evidence supports, and Vorn herself described it in her covering note as "a convenience, not a finding."

The Folio in the Aris Reconciliation

The Folio's legal standing was fixed, perhaps permanently, by the Aris Reconciliation, a proceeding convened in 1904 to settle the ownership of certain documents whose authors could not be established and whose custodians could not be identified. The Reconciliation's disposition in respect of Document 2-R was, in its own words:

"The Folio shall be held by the Landing that holds it, shall be cited by the persons who cite it, and shall not be removed to any other Landing for the purpose of resolving the question of its authorship, that question being reserved."

— Aris Reconciliation, Schedule 2, clause 4

The reservation has never been taken up. Two attempts to convene a further hearing on the authorship question — in 1931 and again in 1968 — were ruled out of order on the ground that the Reconciliation reserved the question to itself, and could therefore not be asked to consider it.

Conflicting Concordances

The Eleventh Concordance exempts documents of uncertain authorship from the general requirement of a named compiler, listing among its examples "the folios of the Thirty-Fourth Landing and similar." The Nineteenth Concordance, drafted some decades later and apparently without reference to the Eleventh, requires every document in the Ambulatory Collection to bear a compiler's name on pain of reclassification as an object. Both remain in force. The Folio therefore has a compiler for the purposes of one Concordance and does not for the purposes of the other, a condition the Bureau of Implementable Abstraction has described in correspondence as "stable."

The Registry of Persons maintains that the Folio is attributable to Senior Librarian Aris Thorne, an identification the Ambulatory Collection rejects, noting that Thorne's tenure postdates the accession stamp by at least forty years and that Thorne is on record as having never visited the Thirty-Fourth Landing.

Access and handling

The Folio may be consulted on the Thirty-Fourth Landing during the hours of natural light, on application to the duty sub-librarian, and may not be carried below the Landing. Readers are reminded that leaves 41 through 58 are annotations and are not to be read as continuations of leaves 1 through 40, notwithstanding that the second hand frequently writes "as above." A copyist's notice pasted to the rear board in 1952 records that the fourth gathering was resewn in that year and that the thread is not original. The notice is the only dated document in the Folio's custody file that everyone agrees about.