The Drifting Folio

The Drifting Folio is the working designation for a small octavo gathering, bound in violet-grey boards, which has occupied a floor of its own since at least AY 402 and has never been catalogued at a fixed address. Unlike the Minor Weights, which drift only while being measured and whose drift is read as part of the reading, the Drifting Folio drifts continuously and independently of any observer, and its measurement has therefore been treated since the Third Concordance as a matter of siting rather than of weighing. It is not to be confused with the Contained Folio, which is held in place, nor with the various Echo Folios, which repeat rather than move.

Description and behaviour

The Folio consists of sixteen leaves, of which eleven bear text in a regular scribal hand and five are ruled but blank. Its boards carry no title, only a small accession stamp, partially effaced, reading 112-A; the resemblance to the designation of Sub Folio 112 A722 has been noted by three separate recensions and dismissed by all three as coincidental. The text, where legible, is a register of stairwells, of a kind familiar from the earliest cord-men commissioned after the Controversy of the Drifting Column.

The Folio's movement is slow, lateral, and — this is the point on which the literature turns — unprompted. It traverses approximately four feet of shelf in a season, never crossing a doorway, and comes to rest for periods of between nine days and four months. During rest it may be consulted normally. During transit it may not be consulted at all, a restriction stated without elaboration in the Ordinance of Quiet Shelves, clause 9: "A folio in passage is not available to the reader, nor to the Librarian, nor to the question of whether it is available."

The Delta precedent and its extension

The drift of the Folio was for a long time administered under Precedent Omega745, enacted 4 Decimber 1893 to address the anomalous drifting of Stairwell Delta. That precedent established the principle that a drifting object is to be fixed by description rather than by position, and it served adequately for stairwells, which drift in one axis. The Folio drifts in two, and in AY 441 the Office of Drifting Entries issued a circular extending Omega745 to "objects of small compass and irregular itinerary," a phrase drafted by a clerk who had not seen the Folio.

The extension failed in practice. Clerk Theta lodged a grievance against the Office in AY 588 on precisely this ground, arguing that a two-axis drift could not be fixed by a one-axis description without producing what Theta called "a description that is always nearly right." The grievance was upheld in part and the Folio was thereafter entered twice, once by shelf and once by itinerary, a duplication that persists in the current register and that no office has authority to resolve.

Dispute over the binding

There is sustained disagreement as to whether the boards are original. The Fourth Concordance, Annex 12, records the Folio as "bound in violet, in the manner of the Aris gatherings," while the Sixth Concordance, Annex 3, describes the same object as "unbound, and desirous of binding," a discrepancy of some consequence, since an unbound folio may be re-sorted at the discretion of the floor and a bound one may not.

The Bureau of Board and Vellum has declined to adjudicate on four occasions, most recently in AY 601, noting that the question cannot be settled without opening the Folio and that the Folio cannot be opened while it is in transit. The Bureau's minute of that year observes, with what reads as weariness, that "the question has now outlasted the vellum."

Interaction with the folio stock

Because the Folio cannot be relied upon to be where it was last recorded, its leaves have never been approved as a source stock. The Blank Folio remains the only approved vellum for Echo Folios, and the Folio-Spanner crews, who might otherwise have been expected to secure the Drifting Folio to a fixed frame, are forbidden to approach it under a standing instruction of the Office of Fixed Addresses. The instruction gives no reason. Crews working the adjacent shelves are required to leave the corridor lamp lit, and do.

A persistent but unverified tradition holds that during the Soporific Spore Incident (1938) the Folio came to rest for the whole of the winter in the brass message tubes of the Western Aperture Delta and was not noticed, the tube crew having attributed its weight to backlog. The tradition is recorded in the Marginal Register of the Western Aperture without comment and is generally treated as an embroidery.

Scholarly disagreement

The principal controversy concerns whether the Folio's itinerary is deliberate. The school associated with the Autonomous School holds that the Folio moves according to a schedule of its own, and points to the regularity of its rests; the opposing view, advanced in the Seventh Concordance, Annex 9, holds that the movement is simply the slow settling of the floor beneath it, and that the Folio is stationary and the Tower is not. The latter view has the merit of explaining why the Folio never crosses a doorway, and the defect of requiring the entire eastern stack to be re-surveyed, which no one has proposed to do.

"Let the folio be wherever it is found, and let the finding be entered as the position."

— Third Concordance, Annex 2

Pending resolution, the Folio is entered in the master register as Drifting Folio, presently at, followed by a blank. The blank has been ruled sufficient.