August 9. A place that does not exist is in a list.
At ten past nine I opened the imprint index.
A list of current imprints. In alphabetical order, twenty-four to a page.
I went to P.
Pnakotic Press is there.
At twenty past nine I looked at the row.
There are four fields. Imprint name, number of materials, date first listed, date last amended.
The number is one. The bound set.
The date first listed is the ninth of August, two thousand. The date last amended is the same.
At twenty to ten I read the head note of the index.
It says it carries current imprints.
It says no separate record of past ones is kept.
What is carried is current. There is nowhere for it to be carried in any other sense.
At ten I opened the four separately.
The imprint field of the four reads unknown. I left it so in February.
What went up in the index is the bound set alone.
Of five bearing the same stamp, one is current and four are unknown.
At twenty past ten I looked at the procedure.
It says materials bearing the same showing are entered the same.
The four have the showing. All five have it.
From half past ten to eleven I amended the four.
I went back to that row in the index.
The number is five.
At half past eleven I looked for the way out.
I looked for a list where closed imprints are kept.
There is none.
Only the current list. There is a door in and no door out.
At twelve a form came down from head office.
Confirmation of a newly listed imprint, it says.
There are four boxes. Business number, address, principal, telephone.
There is none of the four.
At half past twelve I looked at the back of the form.
Where there is no business number, it is classed as an old-stock imprint, it says.
An old-stock imprint is not subject to confirmation, it says.
Leave all four boxes blank and no confirmation is made.
At twenty to one I left the four blank and sent it.
Leaving blank is not new. I left blank in February too.
What I left blank in February became unknown on a screen.
What I left blank today spared it confirmation.
The same act, and what came out of it is different.
At one I opened the query record.
There is a field for route. Title, imprint, person entering, year.
Until now it was title.
This morning two came in by imprint.
Someone who does not know the title came in by running down P.
At twenty-five past one a third inquiry was waiting.
It says they came in by the imprint route.
It says they saw the name running down P. It says they did not know the title.
March's and the second of August's knew the title first. This one did not.
This is someone who could not have found it before the listing.
From half past one to half past two I wrote out what it was that had been revived.
The place does not exist. It is in the index. The index carries only the current.
What I did was write six characters.
Those six characters were on the stamp. A stamp does not change in fifty years.
They are not characters I made. I copied them out.
For eight months what was copied out has grown. A row was gained, a value grew, an empty box was filled, a date moved, a page was gained.
This time nothing grew. Something came to be.
At half past two I tried to settle whose act it was.
The box was there. The box asks only about the current. I entered what it asked.
There was no basis for entering. There was no box demanding one either.
It did not ask about what is not there. It asked about what is.
I filled it. The box was made that way.
There is nothing to count with to tell which of the two revived it.
From three to half past three I waited for the telephone.
The refresh will have gone to the man I spoke with in February.
It did not come.
An old-stock imprint is not subject to confirmation.
At four I opened the right-hand material.
Four hundred and thirty-nine pages. The date on the page gained is the seventh of September of ninety-eight.
My log is also on its four hundred and thirty-ninth page today.
The list of persons entering has four rows.
At twenty to five I set the counts against each other.
The count in the index is five. The sub-numbers inside the bound set are five.
The articles for the box are six. My log is the sixth.
The index does not count the box. The box is not in the index.
At ten to five I opened the box.
Seven. Six impressions. The hundred and sixty-seventh day.
At five I looked at the sixth box.
Two thousand and fifty-nine. This morning it was two thousand and forty-six.
At ten past five I ran off the query record. The set's row was opened nine times yesterday. The eight Latin characters, five.
At half past five I opened that row in the index again.
There were five fields. Earlier I counted four.
There is one more beside the date first listed.
Reason for listing. It says it is automatically generated.
What is entered is: imprint showing confirmed.
At twenty to six I looked for the person who confirmed it.
There is no box.
It says an automatically generated entry keeps no person entering.
The one who confirmed it is me.
The person who entered a place that does not exist as existing is not in that row.
The row is.