Transfer to Related Galleries

Transfer to Related Galleries is the formal designation, under 5e Stage 3, for the movement of holdings between galleries that share a recognised kinship of subject, function, or accumulated damp. It is distinguished from ordinary Transfer in that neither gallery is a Designated Transfer destination, and from Provisional Authority Transfer in that no lapse of jurisdiction is alleged. A Transfer to Related Galleries is instead justified by affinity: the receiving gallery is held to be, in the language of the Fourth Concordance, "the same gallery, differently shelved" (Fourth Concordance, Annex 6). The designation is older than the procedure. Clerks of the Dim Galleries are recorded using the phrase as early as the third recension of the Register of Galleries and Quasi-Galleries, though the Register then applied it only to galleries connected by a common stairwell. The modern sense — affinity of subject rather than architecture — is generally credited to Thessaly of the Dim Galleries, whose marginal note of 14 Eleventh-month 1647 reads: "Two galleries are related if a reader would be unsurprised to find the same book in both."

Procedure

A Transfer to Related Galleries is opened by a declaration of affinity, filed with the Office of Gallery Relations and countersigned by the Seal-Warden on duty at the nearest transfer gallery. The Memo of Trans-Spatial Transfer required at Stage 1 of 5e is in these cases shortened to a single leaf, since the parties are by definition related and no full account of the holdings need be given to strangers.

The declaration must specify the ground of affinity. The approved grounds are four in number — subject, function, provenance, and structural failure — and are set out without elaboration in Schedule of Affinities 9. Requests on the fourth ground are the most frequent and the most contested; the Fungus-Garden Galleries alone filed four hundred and eleven such requests in the winter of the damp year, of which three hundred and ninety were granted, largely because the receiving gallery had also failed.

Disputes over affinity are heard by the Assessor of Kinships, an office currently held by Clerk Ondrey Vasp, whose appointment in 1703 was itself disputed and never resolved. Vasp has ruled on the question of whether a gallery may be related to itself (he holds that it may, "on sad occasions") and on whether two galleries may be related solely through a third (he holds that they may not, calling this "a marriage of corridors").

The Contradiction of Annex 6

Scholarly disagreement attaches chiefly to the phrase quoted above. The Fourth Concordance, Annex 6, holds that a related gallery is "the same gallery, differently shelved," and that no record of transfer need therefore be kept. The Seventh Concordance, Annex 2, holds the opposite: that two galleries so related are "distinct in the eyes of the archive, and the archive has many eyes." Clerks resolved the conflict for two centuries by filing the record and denying it, a practice defended in Observations on the Transfer of Holdings (1721) as "keeping the truth in both places at once, which is what galleries are for."

The dispute became acute during the Crisis of the Receding Galleries, when Archive Series Gamma-7 was transferred three times between related galleries and the cataloguers could not determine, under Annex 6, whether it had moved at all. The matter was settled by the Ninth Concordance in a single line: "It moved." No annex was appended, and the formula has since been cited in preference to either earlier text.

Notable Cases

The transfer of the Whispering Galleries holdings into The Whispering Galleries Provisional Annex is the standard example used in clerkly instruction, being a transfer between galleries related by acoustic function alone. It is notable that the Annex was later found to be related to the Transitory Galleries on the same ground, producing a chain the Assessor declined to hear.

In the matter of the Vellum Galleries and the secondary access route through the Fungus-Garden Galleries, the Office ruled in 1699 that ventilation and affinity are different things, and that a shared duct does not make a family. The ruling is printed on a card affixed to the door in question.

Record-Keeping

Every Transfer to Related Galleries is entered in the affinity ledger of the receiving gallery, in duplicate, and one copy is walked to the sending gallery by hand where the galleries are related by structure and cannot be reached otherwise. Ledger entries are made in the presence of a second clerk where possible.

Persons accompanying a transferred holding may not remain in the receiving gallery after the entry is signed, and must not read anything shelved there, however closely related it appears to material they have already read.

"Affinity is not permission. The book knows its cousins; the reader does not."

— Schedule of Affinities, preamble