The Twenty-Second Concordance, Clause 7

The Twenty-Second Concordance, Clause 7 is the operative provision of the Twenty-Second Concordance governing the Movement of Stacks — that is, the authorised relocation of shelved material between floors, alcoves, and spirals of the Tower. It is the clause under which the Keeper of the Table is appointed, and thus the constitutional root of an office that has outlived the document establishing it. Clause 7 runs to four folios in its original recension and to eleven in the amended, the additional folios being almost entirely devoted to the question of what counts as a stack having moved.

Text and structure

Clause 7 is divided into nine sub-clauses, conventionally cited as 7(i) through 7(ix), of which 7(vi) has been read into the record of nearly every movement dispute since the clause's promulgation. Its opening line is the most frequently quoted sentence in the movement literature:

"A stack, once moved, is moved; a stack unmoved shall not be recorded as moved, nor a moved stack restored to the appearance of its former place without notice."

— Twenty-Second Concordance, Clause 7(i)

The remainder of the clause concerns the appointment and duties of the Keeper of the Table, the register of movements, and the intervals at which the register is to be reconciled against the physical shelves. Sub-clauses 7(ii) through 7(v) are procedural and rarely litigated. Sub-clauses 7(viii) and 7(ix) were added in amendment and are held by some commentators to belong properly to a separate instrument.

The Keeper of the Table

By the plain reading of 7(ii), the Keeper of the Table is appointed by the Librarians and holds the register of all stack movements. The office is older than the clause in practice and younger than it in law: the Second Concordance Addendum 3 of Clause Vii records a Keeper acting some eleven years before the Twenty-Second was sealed, a discrepancy long explained by the amended text, which assigns the office's establishment to Clause 7 of the Twenty-Second Concordance rather than to the original. The distinction matters chiefly to the Keeper's pension, which is calculated from the amended date and not the original.

Disputes over the Keeper's authority are heard by the Office of Latent Properties, which has twice ruled that the Keeper may not be compelled to produce the register in a form other than that in which it is kept. The register is kept in pencil.

Supersession and survival

The Twenty-Third Concordance superseded the Twenty-Second Concordance in its entirety, and Clause 7 with it. The Keeper of the Table nonetheless continued in post, on the reasoning that an office appointed under a clause does not fall with the clause unless the successor instrument says so, and the Twenty-Third Concordance does not say so. Clause 7's register requirements were carried forward almost verbatim as Clause 881 of the Twenty Third Concordance, and again into the Twenty-Fourth Concordance, where the drafting committee is known to have consulted the original folios directly rather than the Twenty-Third's paraphrase. Later instruments reproduced the original's errors of cross-reference, a fact noted without comment in the Twenty-Fourth Concordance's preamble.

The Dispute of the Eleventh Folio

Scholarly disagreement attaches principally to sub-clause 7(vi), which in the original recension reads: "and the stack shall be returned." Returned where, by whom, and within what interval the clause does not say. The Guild of Subterranean Scribes maintains that 7(vi) is a scribal intrusion from the Second Concordance, Annex 4, Clause 12, copied in error by a copyist working from a bound collection of annexes, and that the clause proper ends at 7(v). Against this, the office of the Keeper of the Table has always treated 7(vi) as operative, and has since 2841 maintained a return ledger in which every entry reads "no stack outstanding."

The strongest evidence for the intrusion theory is palaeographic. The hand of 7(vi) is broader than its neighbours and the abbreviation for revertatur is of a form otherwise unattested in the Twenty-Second's scriptorium. The strongest evidence against is the Twenty-Second Concordance, which rather than striking 7(vi) expanded it to two and a half folios, and in doing so preserved the phrase "and the stack shall be returned" without alteration. A document's amenders are ordinarily taken to know what they are amending. Substantial Formalism, which the Twenty-Second Concordance extensively codified, would not permit so substantial a provision to be read out of the text on palaeographic grounds alone.

A third position, advanced by the Office of Visual Resonance in a memorandum of 2904 and never withdrawn, holds that the question is not whether 7(vi) is authentic but whether the stack in question was ever a stack, the office having at the time been engaged in a prolonged disagreement with the movement registry over the classification of certain flat materials.

Practical effect

In ordinary operation Clause 7 imposes two requirements on any movement of shelved material: that the movement be entered in the register before it is undertaken rather than after, and that the entry record the floor of origin and the floor of destination in that order. The second requirement has occasioned more correction than any other provision in the Twenty-Second. Movements recorded destination-first are void and must be re-performed, which in practice means the stack is walked back and walked forward again; on Floor 707, where the Twenty-Second Concordance's Annex C, Clause 7 mandates an acoustic buffer, this is done silently.

The clause does not apply to material carried by hand across a single landing, a category introduced by the amended text and defined in a footnote of some two hundred words. Readers consulting Clause 7 are directed to Concordance Twenty-Second, Annex G, Clause 22, which treats of the same subject at greater length and, in the view of most of the order, greater clarity.