Tower's

The Tower's is the possessive register of the Tower: a bound series of ledgers in which every catalogue entry is recorded a second time in the genitive, so that a thing may be cited not only as itself but as belonging to something. The practice is old, administrative rather than mystical, and is maintained by the Registry of Belonging under the general authority of the Librarians. A holding is said to be "in the Tower's" when its possessive entry has been sealed; holdings that have never been sealed are termed unpossessed and may not be lent, copied, or cited in a dispute.

History and the Apostrophe Question

The register was established by Concordance 71 in the aftermath of the Suffix Riots, an incident of TR 2,408 in which three floors disputed whether a thing catalogued as belonging to a reader could be said to belong to the Tower as well. The Riots produced no casualties and four hundred pages of argument. Concordance 71 resolved the matter by declaring that all holdings belong to the Tower first and to any other party second, and that the possessive form was to be marked on every entry by the addition of a terminal apostrophe, without a following s.

This last clause has never been fully obeyed. The Office of Terminal Marks reports that roughly one entry in nine retains an additional s, chiefly on floors above 9,000, where the older scriptorium hand persisted. The Office's position, restated annually, is that the s is ornamental and carries no legal weight. The Floor 9,113 Scriptorium disputes this on the grounds that its recensions predate the Office by some six hundred years and that a mark in continuous use is not ornamental merely because it is redundant.

"A mark is not a decoration. It is a claim. Where the claim is redundant, it is still a claim."

— Floor 9,113 Scriptorium, Memorial of TR 8,771

Procedure and the Clerk Venn

Sealing is performed by a Clerk of Belonging, who must enter the holding's name, its Tower Floor number, and the party to whom it is said to belong, and must then strike the terminal mark in the presence of a witness. The clerk may not be the witness. The clerk may also not be the party named in the entry, a rule added after the Venn Affair of TR 11,006, in which a Clerk of Belonging named Venn sealed forty-one holdings to himself across eleven floors before the discrepancy was noted. Venn maintained that he had done so to test the register and that the test had succeeded. He was reassigned to Tower Topography and the forty-one entries were struck, though three were later restored on appeal because the holdings in question had belonged to Venn by earlier instrument.

The procedure is short and the waiting is long. Clerks work from a queue kept in ink on a board in the Appendix Corridor; the queue is wiped and rewritten each Tower Month, and it is a mark of some standing among clerks to have one's name wiped before the month's end. A holding sealed in the final week of a month is dated to the month's close by convention, a practice the Office of Terminal Marks has challenged four times and lost four times.

The Contradiction of the Two Annexes

Scholarly dispute centres on whether the register establishes ownership or merely records the claim of it. Concordance 71, Annex 2 states flatly that "the mark confers what it states," which would make the register constitutive. Concordance 71, Annex 6, added by amendment in TR 4,190, states with equal flatness that "the mark states what is conferred," which would make it merely declaratory. The two annexes have never been reconciled, and the Second Concordance cites both in the same article without comment.

The prevailing view, associated with the archivist Osric of the Ninth Landing, holds that Annex 2 governs disputes between floors while Annex 6 governs disputes within a floor, a reading that resolves every case in the record and explains nothing. A minority, chiefly the late Clerk Amadine, argued that the annexes describe the same act from opposite ends and that the appearance of contradiction is an artifact of reading them in sequence rather than simultaneously. Amadine's monograph on the subject is held by the Registry but may not be lent, because its own possessive entry was never sealed.

Notable Entries

Certain entries are consulted more often than the rest and are handled with gloves:

• The Tower's own entry, sealed at Floor 1 and revised eleven times, the only entry that names the Tower as both possessor and possession.
• The entry for the Lignum Vitae Tower Taxon, sealed under Tower Law in TR 6,510.
• The unpossessed entry for the Tower's shadow, which the Registry has declined to seal on the ground that it has never been catalogued and therefore cannot belong to anything.

Access

The register is kept on Tower Floor 4,712 and may be consulted by any holder of a valid reader's mark during the hours the floor is open. Readers are asked not to lean on the ledgers. Food is not permitted on Floor 4,712, and this is enforced.

Consultation appointments are dated by the Tower Calendar in Tower Reckoning, and a request lodged after the close of a Tower Day is entered against the following day regardless of the hour. The Tower Financial Cycle does not apply to the Registry, which is funded by the floors it serves in proportion to the number of entries each contributes; floors that contribute few entries have occasionally attempted to contribute fewer.