Ventricular Canon

The Ventricular Canon is the collection of personal, unfinished, and posthumously contested manuscripts of former Head Librarians, held in the Ventricular Reading Room on Floor 1 of the Central Reading Room. It is not, as is frequently supposed by junior staff, a canon in the sense of an approved body of doctrine. The name refers rather to the arrangement of the holdings, which are shelved concentrically in chambers of decreasing size, and to the fact that nothing in it has ever been conclusively finished. The Canon presently comprises one hundred and forty-one works, of which eleven are complete. Nine of those eleven are disputed.

The Canon is administered by the Spiral Secretariat, which opens the room at the second bell and closes it at the forty-seventh minute past the eleventh hour, an interval derived from the Ventricular Reading Room's threshold for Sustained Reading. On the first day of each quarter the Secretariat conducts the Collation, at which a Custodian reads the ending of every complete work aloud and the assembly votes on whether the ending was intended.

Composition and arrangement

An admission to the Canon requires three conditions, none of them written down: that the Head Librarian in question left the work unfinished at death, that the work was begun during their tenure, and that at least one surviving Librarian disputes its attribution. The third condition has never failed. The Spiral Secretariat's standing commentary on this point is brief: "Every Head Librarian is contested by at least one who outlived them, and it would be a discourtesy to the office to suppose otherwise" (Spiral Secretariat, Quarterly Collation Remarks, 41st Collation).

Works are assigned to chambers by breadth of margin rather than by date or author. The innermost chamber, the Ventricle proper, holds nine manuscripts with margins exceeding four fingers' width, including Librarian Veil's Synopsis of Unwritten Rules, which is unfinished in the ordinary sense and also, according to the Secretariat's own finding of 293, unfinished in a second sense that it declines to specify. The outermost chamber holds the drafts of Corbel, whose Drafts for a Unified Index remain in the Canon despite the numerical inconsistencies that Vect's survey of 309 catalogued at length and without evident pleasure.

The Fourteen-Day Exchange

The Canon's holdings are not fixed to the room. Under a practice first entered in the Secretariat's daybook in the winter of 268, any Librarian admitted to the Ventricle may remove a single manuscript to a private desk for fourteen days. The practice was intended to permit close study. Its consequences were not foreseen.

Manuscripts removed under the Exchange have repeatedly failed to return in the condition in which they left. In the most thoroughly documented case, a recension of the Synopsis borrowed by Librarian Nest of the Ninth Stair in 271 came back with an additional chapter in a hand that was not Veil's, appended without note or attribution. The Secretariat convened a hearing, ruled the chapter "provisionally present" (Spiral Secretariat, Ruling 271-6), and re-shelved the manuscript without removing it. The chapter is still there. It has since acquired two commentaries and a dissent.

"A work once borrowed is a work twice written, and the second writing is the one we are obliged to keep."

— Spiral Secretariat, Ruling 271-6, Preamble

Not all returns have been so orderly. In 284 the Exchange was suspended for a full season after the manuscript known as the Sleeve of Orm returned in a wrapping of oilcloth bearing a seal of the Canon of Preserved Absences. The Secretariat's investigation concluded that the manuscript had not travelled to Annex Theta-4 and that the oilcloth had. It was filed accordingly, and the matter is considered closed in the sense that it is not discussed.

Relation to other canons

The Ventricular Canon is one of five canons recognised by the MasterĠRegistryĠofĠAssumedĠKnowledgeĠ(MRAK), and the only one of the five whose holdings are all individual works rather than documents. This has made it a useful comparison for scholars of the Treatise on Ephemeral Canons, which proposes that a canon persists only while someone continues to contest it — a proposal the Ventricular Canon is routinely cited to support and never cited to refute.

The relationship with the Dusk Canon is less settled. The Dusk Canon is theoretical and its sole physical remnant is Fragment 889; the Ventricular Canon is physical and its sole theoretical holding is the additional chapter to the Synopsis, whose author has never been named. The Doctrine of Coincident Progress holds that this pairing is not accidental but simply slow. The Spiral Secretariat has declined to comment on the Doctrine in any numbered document, which is a comment of a kind.

Scholarly disagreement

The extent of the Canon is contested between the Secretariat and the compilers of the Seventh Concordance. The Secretariat counts one hundred and forty-one works, excluding the additional chapter as an accretion. The Concordance's schedule of holdings, Annex 12, counts one hundred and forty-two, admitting the chapter as a separate work on the ground that a text written into a manuscript and shelved with it cannot afterwards be said not to be there. Neither body will yield.

The dispute has produced a small literature of its own, including a dissent by Librarian Ostreath arguing that the count is a category error and that the Canon is properly described as "one hundred and forty-one works and whatever else is in the room" (Ostreath, Marginalia on Annex 12, 317). Ostreath's formula was adopted informally by the room's readers and refused formally by both offices.

Readers' rules

Consultation is by petition to the Spiral Secretariat, supported by the signature of one Librarian of the third grade or above. No more than three works may be requested at one sitting. Pens are not permitted in the Ventricle; pencil may be used, but not in the margin of a manuscript with margins exceeding four fingers' width, since the sheet itself is wider than the writing it protects and the Secretariat prefers it to remain so. Coats are to be left at the door. The room is closed every year on the anniversary of Veil's death, and on that day the Synopsis is laid open at whatever page it is found to be open at, and no one looks at the closing chapter.