The Bibliography, and Its Condition
Every claim on the other pages in this folder is cited to something. This page says what those somethings are and how much weight each will take, which in several cases is not much. It is written in the form Sisken used, because the form is good: the citation and the condition of the citation are separate lines.
The Fallow Ledger
A mimeographed newsletter, 84 issues, Spring 1981 to Winter 1996, quarterly and then irregular. Print run reported as between 60 and 110. It is the single source for perhaps two thirds of everything in this folder, which is a problem that gets stated less often than it should.
| Issues | Condition | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1–8 | one incomplete set claimed, not produced | includes No. 3, the earliest lore/quiet-exchange account |
| 9–40 | good; three sets in private hands | the lore/halberd-and-ossuary exchange is No. 39 |
| 41–48 | good | No. 41 is the specimen card; No. 47 is "On Sitting" |
| 49–63 | good | the lore/gravewalker column, 52–63 |
| 64–83 | patchy, several issues attested only by index | includes No. 62, "Cold Comfort" |
| 84 | good; widely copied | the last issue |
The row that should worry a reader is the first. No. 3 carries the two-second gap and the forty seconds of silence — the details that make the Quiet Exchange a coherent account rather than a fourteen-word ledger entry — and nobody has produced No. 3 since 1998. The set is claimed, and claimed by someone who has been asked politely four times.
Everything about the incident that is not in the Marchford ledger descends from an issue nobody has seen in a quarter of a century.
The Marchford maintenance ledger
Bound office copy, Cordell Telephone & Signal, shift records for 1978. Fourteen words are quoted from it constantly. Custody is claimed by three parties whose claims are mutually exclusive; see lore/quiet-exchange. Nobody has offered to show it in thirty years.
Ledger-true if produced. Not produced.
The Cold Handshake papers
Three documents, all from the Ashgrove Group, and this is the best-evidenced material in the folder by a wide margin — it is the only part with an institutional paper trail rather than a social one.
- The 1983 draft. Photocopies common. Uncontroversial.
- Errata 3, March 1987. Two pages. Common.
- The withdrawal notice, September 1989. Common.
The whole argument on lore/cold-handshake is available to anyone holding all three, and consists of noticing that the third does not mention the second. That is why it is the one claim in this folder that does not depend on anybody's memory, and it is also, not coincidentally, the least dramatic.
Proceedings of the Third Fallow Meet, 1988
Forty copies, stapled, no publisher. Contains the transcript in which an unnamed attendee claims the Marchford ledger was pulped. Twelve copies are known to survive and they agree, which is the strongest textual position of anything here.
Also the source for the retensioning incident referenced on lore/marrow-tape, in an appendix added by hand to some copies and not others. The variant appendix is a genuine bibliographic mess and has never been sorted out.
Oral
Everything on lore/port-4919's three reasons, most of lore/long-count's failure modes, the whole of the lore/open-hand's pre-1988 dating, and the entirety of what anyone claims about lore/vesper-node's location.
Oral does not mean worthless and it does mean the claim cannot be checked against anything but another person's telling. The lexicon has a word for the difference and uses it sparingly; see ledger-true in lore/lexicon.
The banner and the tape
Neither is a source. Both are objects that survive as copies of copies, and the lore/armistice-banner page sets out why its variant readings are more useful than a canonical text would be. A reconstruction assembled from fifteen disagreeing copies should be cited as a reconstruction, every time, including when it is almost certainly right.
The general problem
Read down this page and the shape is unmistakable: the best-attested material is the least interesting, and the load-bearing claims rest on a newsletter with a print run of eighty and one bound ledger nobody will produce. That is not a defect peculiar to this tradition. It is what happens to any body of knowledge whose founding convention was that you write down the plant and not the person.
The convention had a reason and the reason was good. The cost is this page.
Related
- lore/index — the collection
- lore/sisken — whose card format this page borrows
- lore/lineage — which edges these sources support
- machinery/provenance — the same separation, applied to this wiki