On keeping what cannot be answered

Sirs,

I write concerning the register of Misdirected enquiries, and against the view — I am aware it is the general view (I have been reminded of it more than once, always kindly) — that the register is a curiosity to be kept, and not a holding to be catalogued. I ask the reader to bear with a distinction that will seem small. It is not small.

The objection, stated fairly

The objection is that the enquiries concern nothing we hold; that to catalogue them would be to promote error to the rank of material; and that a collection which lists what it does not contain will shortly be listing everything. (I simplify, but not, I think, unfairly.)

Three entries

Let me put three entries before the reader, exactly as transcribed.

The first reads, in its entirety, oberst emelia sr and arrest and harperchester and th — breaking off in the middle of a word. There is no Harperchester in any gazetteer I have consulted (I have consulted several, perhaps too many). Whether the sender sought a person, a rank, or a place, the entry does not say, and no continuation ever arrived.

The second reads ambulances et taxi à Laval-Roquecezière. This is a perfectly answerable question — answerable, that is, by the right directory. We are not the right directory. Someone believed we were, and that belief, recorded and dated, is the only fact the entry contains. It is a fact.

The third is written in Indonesian: makna lagu polaroid ian moloney — a request, as I understand it, for the meaning of a song called Polaroid by one Ian Moloney. We hold no recordings. We hold, so far as anyone can establish, no music at all (unless one counts what the annotation calls the Levernet Rhapsody, and no one can say whether that is music, or a place, or something else again).

What the entries know

Here is the substance of my position. We already keep, and defend keeping, a phrase whose nature nobody has established: the Levernet annotation is retained because it was written down, and its being written down is held to be enough. The Moloney enquiry differs from it only in having arrived by post. I do not see (I have looked) the principle that admits the one and bars the other.

And consider what we say about The trader's claim. An assertion was made, once, aloud, at a checkout desk; it was never written down; and it is, I would suggest, the single most regretted absence in the collection. We possess exactly one assertion that everyone wishes had been recorded, and a standing policy of not recording the assertions we receive daily. The irony is not mine; I merely report it.

Nor is an unpublished rule any obstacle to cataloguing. The Dispensing schedule follows no stated rule, is published nowhere, and is nonetheless treated as a fact about the world worth an entry. An enquiry is no less a fact for being mistaken.

What I ask

I ask for very little (it will be said that I ask for a great deal; both things may be true). I ask that the register be given a shelfmark; that its entries be indexed under the names they contain, Harperchester included; and that the question of what the entries mean be left exactly as open as it is now. Cataloguing settles nothing. It only admits that there is something to settle.

The attendant who opened the register wrote that an enquiry records a belief about the collection, and that such a belief is a fact about the collection even where its object is not. I have not improved on that sentence in some years of trying. I offer it to the reader in place of a conclusion, and I remain, with respect, a former attendant of the reading room.

See also

• Levernet Rhapsody — Levernet Rhapsody, The trader's claim
• External ordering — Dispensing schedule
• Herman James — Levernet Rhapsody
• Misdirected enquiries — Misdirected enquiries
• Odette Pruvost — Misdirected enquiries
• The pairing habit — Misdirected enquiries
• Note on the second service — Misdirected enquiries
• Route document