The Register of Essential Contiguities

Scope and standing

The Register of Essential Contiguities is a standing register maintained under the authority of the Precedent Register, recording pairs and longer series of catalogued entities which, though catalogued separately, are held to be essentially contiguous — that is, their adjacency is treated as a property of the entries themselves rather than of any shelf, floor, or scriptorium in which they happen to be found. The Register was opened in the winter of the 9,411th fiscal reckoning and has been amended on 214 occasions, most recently by Ordinance 711-B, which narrowed the qualifying test from "invariable co-occurrence" to "co-occurrence under inspection."

The Register is consulted chiefly by the Inspection Cadre during audits of the Central Wall-Register, and by clerks of the Botanical Register seeking to explain why certain Floor 112 specimens refuse to be shelved apart. Its entries are numbered in the Roman alphabet followed by Arabic numerals (A-1 through D-48 at current count) and are grouped into four volumes, of which Volume C is the only one still being written.

Contiguity under the doctrine of essential form

The Register's intellectual basis is the doctrine of essential form, which holds that an object's catalogued identity is paramount over its transient phenomenological state. Applied to contiguity, the doctrine means that two entries are essentially contiguous if their entries could not be separated without altering what each entry is, irrespective of whether the physical objects are currently within metres of one another. Aethelred's Silence, for instance, is recorded in Volume A as essentially contiguous with both the Luminous Papyrus and the Adhesive Silence, on the ground that the former cannot be produced and the latter cannot exist without it.

This reading has never been uncontested. The Sixth Concordance and the Eighth Concordance both claim to outline the doctrine of essential form, and the Register's own editors have historically followed whichever volume was nearest to hand. Volume A cites the Sixth; Volume B cites the Eighth; Volume C cites both and disclaims responsibility.

Method of entry

Entries are proposed by any of the Nine Concordant Guilds, seconded by a clerk of the Register of Irregular Acquisitions, and admitted only after the proposing party has demonstrated that the two entities in question have been observed together on at least three occasions not arranged by the proposing party. The demonstration is entered in the Register's margin with the name of the observing clerk.

The difficulty of satisfying this requirement is considerable. Observations arranged by the proposing party are excluded under the Register of Docketed Intent, on the reasoning that a docketed intention contaminates the contiguity it seeks to prove. In the winter of the 12,904th reckoning, a clerk of the Botanical Register named Halverd Spett attempted to enter Floor 112 moss as essentially contiguous with Luminous Mortar by arranging eleven consecutive sightings of the two in the same alcove. All eleven were struck. Spett's appeal, docketed in the Register of Docketed Intent as item 4,401, remains open and is cited in the Register's introduction as the standing example of what not to do.

Disputed entries

Three entries are presently contested:

• A-7, contiguity of Sleeping Ink with the essential components noted by the Third Concordance. Upheld by Volume A; struck in Volume B on the ground that the Third Concordance describes composition, not adjacency.
• C-12, contiguity of silence-moss with the Spore Atria in which it is produced. Admitted over objection from the Nine Concordant Guilds, who argued that a substrate and its place of manufacture cannot be essentially contiguous without collapsing the distinction between an object and a location.
• D-48, contiguity of the Manual of Essential Inspection with the Vault it governs. Referred to the Inspection Cadre, who bypassed the question by inspecting the Vault directly and declining to report what they found.

A fourth dispute, concerning the Luminous Papyrus and the scriptorium on Floor 602 where it is produced, was resolved by the Register of Reversed Causality, which recorded that the scriptorium had been built to house the contiguity rather than the contiguity having arisen from the scriptorium. The entry stands, though nobody is entirely sure how to cite it.

Custody and access

The Register is held in a glazed case two floors below the Annual Register Sigma-14,022, in a corridor where the reading lamps are refilled on the first and fifteenth of each month. Consultation requires a countersigned slip from the Precedent Register desk; the slip is not returned. Photographic reproduction is forbidden under Ordinance 711-B, and no rubric has been issued explaining what happens to a photograph of an essentially contiguous pair, which the Register's editors have declined to characterise as a gap in the record.

Visitors may read the Register standing. Chairs are not provided, as a chair placed beside the case was found to generate an entry of its own.

See also

• Register of Unfulfilled Introductions
• Substance Analysis
• Lower Register
• Register of Ephemeral Statutes
• Instrumental