Third Concordance, Clause 301.44

Third Concordance, Clause 301.44 is the enumerated clause of the Third Concordance governing the disposition of objects that have been recorded twice, in two places, in the same moment. It is not among the instruments most often cited by the Librarians, but it is among the most often litigated, and the Office of the Receiver of Irregularities maintains a standing docket devoted to it. The clause is short. Its interpretation is not.

Text and placement

Clause 301.44 sits in the third book of the Third Concordance, between the duplicate-seal provisions and the long schedule of stairwell returns. The operative sentence, as recensed in the Fourth Recension, reads:

"Where a thing is found to stand in two holdings at once, it shall not be moved, but shall be entered in both registers, and each register shall note the other."

— Third Concordance, Clause 301.44, Fourth Recension

The clause does not say what a holding is. That is supplied elsewhere: Clause 7 of the Third Concordance operationally defines a holding as "a shelf, a room, or a named interval of corridor in which a thing may be said to be," a definition broad enough that Clause 112 Annex Delta later complained it "would make a holding of any doorway a clerk happened to pause in."

The Sallowfield dispute

The clause's reputation rests on the dispute of the winter of 4,112, when a brass azimuth, catalogued on Floor 771, was reported by a second expedition to be standing simultaneously on Floor 218. The two catalogues were each internally consistent and each signed by a Librarian. Under Clause 301.44 both entries were allowed to stand and cross-noted, and the azimuth was left where it was — which, the difficulty being that it was in two places, meant it was left in both.

The clerk of the Verdigris Wing, Surintendant Ondrey Pell, objected that the clause had produced not a resolution but a second object, and that the Tower's inventories were "now richer than the Tower." His memorandum of the eleventh of that month is preserved and much quoted:

"I am asked to certify that the instrument is on my floor. I am able to certify it. I am also able to certify that this settles nothing, and I decline to pretend otherwise."

— Surintendant Ondrey Pell, memorandum to the Office of the Receiver of Irregularities, 4,112

Pell was overruled. The Clause 37, Third Revision, which established the Receiver's office, gave that office authority over just such irregularities, and it ruled in the spring that a doubled holding was a condition to be recorded and not a fault to be repaired. The ruling has never been formally withdrawn.

The problem of the second register

Clause 301.44 requires each register to note the other. It does not require the notes to agree. In practice the two entries drift, because the clerks who maintain them are not in correspondence and because the clause, in a strict reading favoured by the Scriptorium of the Eleventh Landing, forbids any communication between the registers other than the noting itself. The result is that the Vault register and the Receiving register have, on at least nine occasions, each described the other's entry in terms the other does not recognise. The cross-note variance is a recognised category of defect and is reported quarterly.

The Office of Voluntary Correspondence, created under Clause 22, has offered repeatedly to reconcile such variances. Its offers are logged and declined. The Receiver's position, stated in a circular of 4,140, is that reconciliation would amount to moving the thing, which Clause 301.44 forbids.

Scholarly disagreement

There is no settled view on what the clause is for. The majority reading, associated with the Commentaries, Volume XIX, treats it as a holding action: a temporary tolerance of duplication pending the identification of the true location, which the clause's silence on duration permits but does not promise. The minority reading, advanced by Archivist Melisent Vaudre in her treatise on duplication, treats the tolerance as permanent and the clause as a quiet concession that some objects are simply in two places and that the Tower has decided to say so rather than argue.

The disagreement is sharpened by a textual problem. Third Concordance, Clause VII set out provisional guidelines on doubled entries which were superseded, first by Citing Concordance 4 Clause 112, and then — or so the Annex Delta recension of Clause 33 asserts — by an amendment that does not name Clause 301.44 at all. Vaudre argues from this silence that the clause is orphaned and should be read as merely descriptive. The Commentaries reply that a clause is not orphaned for being left alone, and that the Tower has left many things alone for longer.

Practical notes

Under the clause no doubled object may be dusted on either floor until both registers have been signed on the same day; where the two floors keep different hours, the dusting waits. This is the single most common cause of complaint filed against the clause.

The schedule of doubled holdings is consulted at the Reading Desk of the Third Book and may not be removed from the desk. Visitors wishing to see an object recorded twice should apply in writing to the Receiver; the application will be granted, but the object will be shown on one floor only.