The Index of Recursive Appeals

The Index of Recursive Appeals is a subordinate register maintained in the eastern stacks of Floor 900, recording every appeal which takes as its subject the fact of its own having been appealed. It holds no hearings and issues no rulings; it is, in the words of its founding instrument, "a place to put the paperwork where it will not be trodden on" (Ordinance of Quiet Filing, clause 3). Entries are numbered in the order in which the recursion was recognised, not the order in which it was lodged, and the two orders have not agreed since the winter of the second recension.

The Index is administered jointly by a duty clerk of the Registrar of Particulate Appeals and a reader seconded from the Index of Indeterminate Causality, an arrangement set out in Part IV: Appeals and Revisions and never revised, though it has twice been left unstaffed for a full quarter.

Procedure of entry

A petition reaches the Index only after the receiving desk has satisfied itself that the appeal does not merely concern an earlier appeal but is an appeal about appealing. In practice this distinction is settled by the petitioner's own wording. The desk maintains a short list of forms it will not accept, among them the appeal of an appeal of an appeal lodged on the same day, which is held at the desk, stamped, and returned to the petitioner unaltered. Clerks are not to explain the return.

Once entered, an item is assigned a recursive class in Roman numerals. Class I covers appeals naming themselves in a single clause. Class II covers appeals naming a prior entry that names them in turn. Class III covers what the schedule calls "unhappy arrangements", meaning appeals that name the Index itself as respondent; these are entered and then referred sideways to the Court of Silenced Appeals, which has accepted them since Concordance 41 and has never disposed of one.

The Ferrant grievance

In the winter of the year the eastern stacks were relettered, Duty Clerk Osric Ferrant refused to enter a Class III petition on the ground that entering it would require him to describe the entry in the entry. The Index stood empty for eleven days. Ferrant's memorandum of refusal, still bound in the front matter of the register, puts the difficulty plainly:

"The page requires a line saying what the page is about. The page is about the page. I have written the line and the line has moved."

— Osric Ferrant, Memorandum of Refusal, bound as front matter

The dispute was referred to the Court of Silenced Appeals Annex, which returned it unread with a procedural note. The Index was reopened under an interim practice of entering the petition's outward particulars only — date, petitioner, seal — and leaving the subject line blank. Blank subject lines remain standard in Classes II and III.

Concordance dispute

There is no settled account of what the Index is for. Concordance 12 treats it as an archive of record, holding that an entry, once made, settles the question of whether the appeal was ever lodged. Concordance 39 holds the opposite: that entry is a courtesy and that the appeal's status is determined by the desk that first received it, "as the water is determined by the spring and not by the jug" (Concordance 39, Annex 2). Clerks cite whichever suits the file in front of them, and the Jurisdictional Appeals desk has ruled twice that both citations are correct.

A third position, advanced in the marginalia of a recension held on the Vestibule of Unspoken Appeals and attributed only to a hand of the fourth scriptorium, proposes that the Index is not an archive at all but a delay — that its function is to keep a certain class of appeal in one place long enough for everyone involved to be reassigned. The marginalia has never been formally answered, and the Index has never denied it.

Relation to the Sympathetic Floor Index

The two indexes are frequently confused by petitioners and occasionally by clerks. The Sympathetic Floor Index records which floors may be said to resemble one another; the Index of Recursive Appeals records which appeals may be said to contain one another. Prior to Annex Zeta, attempts to reference assertions of absence in the former produced null entries and recursive faults of the kind now routine in the latter. The Registrar of Particulate Appeals has ruled that the resemblance between the faults is coincidental and is not to be entered as a resemblance of the first kind.

Access

The Index is consulted in the eastern stacks between the second and fifth hours. Petitioners may request their own entry and no other. Readers are asked not to trace an entry's cross-references past the third remove, and the duty clerk will not do so on their behalf.