February 16. A day went on looking for the imprint box.
At ten past nine I opened the outside screen and looked at all four.
Yesterday I looked at one and shut it. The other three were the same.
There are seven boxes and six have writing. There is the material number and the title and the year, and the extent and the recorder and the reading class. The seventh is the imprint.
The imprint of the four is Pnakotic Press. There was nowhere to write it, so I left it empty. The box I left empty has become a word on the screen.
In this room a box left empty has been empty. Leave the completion box empty and nothing comes out; leave the year box empty and it becomes double zero in the list. Double zero is a value. A value is inside the box.
What came out of today's empty box is not a value but a word.
From ten to eleven I read the guidance.
The rule for entering the imprint is article twelve. It says to write it as shown on the publication, and that where there is no such showing the box is left empty. That is the only case for leaving it empty.
Pnakotic Press is shown. It is stamped inside the front cover of all four bundles. Written as shown, it is Pnakotic Press.
Article thirteen comes next. It says that where a periodical has ceased publication the year of cessation is written in brackets.
There is a box for a publication ceasing. There is no box for a publisher ceasing.
There is a box for the case where what came out has ended, and none for the case where the place that put it out has ended. I looked a long while at why the two differ. A publication is the side that is counted and a publisher is the side that counts. The form provides for the counted side ending; it does not provide for the counting side ending.
At twenty past eleven I telephoned head office.
The officer asked which box. The imprint, I said. Is it shown, he asked. It is, I said. Then write it, he said.
The place has ceased trading, I said.
It was quiet a moment.
Writing it puts it on the current imprint index, he said. The index carries only current ones, he said. There are no grounds for putting a ceased place on it as current, so leave it empty.
Left empty it comes up as unknown, I said. That is a display rule, he said, and not for this office to decide.
After I rang off I wrote down what I had been told today.
I heard there were no grounds twice. There were no grounds yesterday either, when I took the fifth bundle out. Then I took it out though there were no grounds, and today there are no grounds so I cannot write it.
The same words let me do it yesterday and stopped me doing it today. Which of the two is the form and which is what I decided does not resolve.
From twelve to half past I looked again at the inside covers of the four bundles.
All four are stamped in the same place. Lower middle, and not printed but stamped. Six letters, and nothing under them. No year and no address.
A stamp writes only that the place was. It does not write whether it is. What the box asks is whether it is.
The stamp does not change in fifty years. What changed is the side that stamped it.
That was when I looked for anything in this room that says ceased.
There is none.
Not on the cards, not in the index, not in the log. Nowhere in the four bundles does it say that the place ended.
Today was the first time I looked for where I learned it had ended, and I did not find it. I already knew it last January when I registered them. I knew and did not write it.
At twenty to one the third-floor man came down. The one who asked yesterday and went up.
Does anybody look, he asked. I opened the sixth box and showed him and said sixty-eight. He looked in and asked whether those were all people.
I do not know, I said.
He put a finger on the imprint box and asked why it was empty. The place is gone, I said. Then write that it is gone, he said.
There is no box for writing it, I said.
He laughed and said if there is none then make one, and went up.
Listening to him going up I thought about that twice. Making is not this room's work. This room fills the boxes there are. It has been so for thirteen months, and today those words sounded odd for the first time.
At ten past one the reply on the recorder list came.
The instruction to amend the four to unknown came again, and this time there is a date. The last day of February.
A rule is attached. Recorders whose names are not confirmed are to be standardised as unknown, and identical entries merged into one row.
There is a box for amending to unknown. There is a rule for merging too.
What was not there in the morning is there in the afternoon. The box that was not there in the morning is the box for writing what I know, and the box that is there in the afternoon is the box for writing that I do not know.
From two to half past three I amended the list.
I amended surveyor and librarian and lighthouse keeper and telegraph operator to unknown. The four became the same entry, so they merged into one row.
Six became three.
The first row is myself, the second unknown, the third Kim Dogyeong. The sort is by last date of entry, so the unknown row took the latest of the four. Thirty-seven.
Twenty-three and twenty-four and thirty-four are gone from the list. The materials are still four and the row is one.
At twenty to four I thought about the ones that had stood in a column.
A month or so ago six stood in one column. Today that column is three. I struck rows and the materials did not decrease, so what decreased is people.
People did not decrease. The boxes that count people decreased. This list does not tell the two apart.
At four I opened the right-hand material.
Two hundred and sixty-four pages. The date of the added page is 16 March 98.
My log is on its two hundred and sixty-fourth page today too. The two numbers are the same. They have come alongside each other for thirteen months and they are alongside today.
At half past four I opened the outside screen again.
The recorder box says unknown. The imprint box says unknown.
There are two unknowns in one row.
One of them I entered myself this afternoon. One of them the screen entered because I did not.
On the screen the two are the same letters. The weight is the same and they sit alongside. From the reading side there is nowhere to tell which is the one not known and which is the one known.
At ten past five I looked at the sixth box.
Seventy-one. This morning it was sixty-three.
At twenty past five I put the cursor in the imprint box.
Ten characters fit. Pnakotic Press is six.
I did not write it. There are no grounds to write it.
There are no grounds and I know.
It took a day to confirm that this form has no box for writing what I know. What I confirmed is that the box is not there, and confirming that it is not there took a day.
Tomorrow it will not be there either. It will stand empty and read unknown.
It is not unknown.