The Corkboard of Perpetual Delegation

The Corkboard of Perpetual Delegation is a framed cork surfacing mounted on the north wall of the antechamber of Floor 407, measuring 1.83 metres by 1.22 metres and bearing, at last census, four hundred and six pinned slips. It is the physical instrument by which the Numerous Delegation records the procedural state of every matter currently before it, and the only object in the Tower whose contents are considered to amend themselves. The board is not a record of decisions. It is a record of which decisions have been routed to whom, and it is maintained on the understanding — set out in Concordance 12, Annex 2 — that a matter left visibly un-delegated is a matter still in good order.

Construction and repair

The board is mounted on four brass brackets cast in the ninth foundry of the lower stairwells and is backed with a double layer of pressed corkboard, the outer layer renewed in 611 and the inner layer never. The inner layer is regarded as original. The board was reframed in the winter of 618, after a heating duct above the antechamber failed and the upper left corner of the cork swelled; the swelling was pressed flat overnight under a stack of unopened accreditation badges, and the resulting discoloration is visible on close inspection and is not to be cleaned. A note to this effect is pinned to the board itself, in the lower right corner, and is the only slip on the board that has never been moved.

Pins are drawn from the board's own supply and are not to be removed from the antechamber. The rule is stated without elaboration in the standing orders of the chamberlain's office: "No pin leaves the room it is pinned in."

Method of pinning

Each slip is a formal instrument. A slip is valid only if it bears the corner mark of the Permanent Submitter Seal, which is applied before pinning and not after; slips pinned first and sealed later are removed, held in a tray for one sitting, and re-pinned, a delay known in the antechamber as "the correction." Each slip records the subject of the matter, the recipient of the delegation, and the date of pinning by the Tower's ordinary reckoning. The reverse of each slip is left blank. This is not an omission; the reverse is reserved, and has been reserved since the board's first mounting, for a purpose not yet recorded in any Concordance.

The board is divided into three zones by two lengths of red thread, though the thread is not fixed and the zones have been understood differently by different clerks. The prevailing reading, defended at length in the Registry of Perpetual Debates, is that the upper zone holds matters delegated outward, the middle zone holds matters delegated inward, and the lower zone holds matters whose delegation has not yet been determined. The lower zone is the largest and is the only zone whose slips are counted twice yearly.

Perpetual Delegation

The doctrine of perpetual delegation holds that a slip remains pinned until the matter it records is returned to the board, and that a matter is never returned to the board. This is not a contradiction but a procedural cycle, and the board's function is to make the cycle visible and its continuing existence the basis of the board's authority. The Delegation is Procedural is often cited at this point, and the record of the board's own gloss on it is preserved in the antechamber's reading library under the shelf mark 407/An.2. The Clerk of Perpetual Pending is charged with the board's weekly inspection, and the office has accordingly been occupied without interruption since the board was mounted.

The board does not hold the pinnings of any matter; the matters are held elsewhere. The board holds only the record of their having been pinnings, and the two are kept in separate rooms.

Dispute of the two counts

The board has been counted on different principles, and the disagreement is now several generations old. The office of the chamberlain's clerk counts every slip on the board as one. The office of the surveyor counts by zone, and treats a slip in the lower zone as one, the middle zone as two, and any slip that overlaps a thread — a slip pinned on the seam between two zones — as three, with a fourth counted for a slip that has been moved. The two counts produce figures that differ by no fixed amount and are never reconciled at the same sitting. The Royal-style reading of Concordance 31 has been invoked by both offices, and the Procedural Stream has been invoked by neither, on the grounds that it has not been read in the antechamber.

The bank of the four hundred and six slips is not agreed at the present date. On the Manual of Perpetual Deferral's authority, the chamberlain's office counts the lower-left cluster, which it describes as "in an arrangement," as a single item. The surveyor counts the four hundred and six slips. The report of the 844 count, transmitted jointly to the Registry of Perpetual Debates, lists four hundred and six slips and the figure of "one arrangement"; both figures are admitted, and neither is read aloud.

Objects pinned and their fate

The board has at various times received items other than slips: a red braid, a seal in a cloth bag, a key of unusual size, a second red braid identical to the first, and a card recording the height of the board's lower edge from the floor, which is 1.44 metres and is to be confirmed. In each case the chairman of the antechamber ordered the item removed; in each case the removal was recorded on the board; in each case the removal of the item was recorded on the item. The board's current contents are therefore, strictly, the slips and not the items, and the items are not in the antechamber, and the slips are.

The second red braid is unaccounted for. It was recorded as pinned in 601, removed in the same sitting, and has since been cited in the board's own paperwork as evidence of a braid, and by no other office as evidence of anything.

Access and the standard warning

Visitors are permitted to the antechamber during the first quarter of the morning and the last quarter of the afternoon, and are requested to leave the board, and the wall, and the pins, in the condition in which they found them. The board has never been photographed. The reason is not procedural.