April 17. The forewords and afterwords came.
At ten past nine I ran off the fax transmission record.
Yesterday there were five transmissions.
Twenty to eleven, ten to eleven, eleven, ten past eleven. The four I sent.
There is one more. Twenty past ten, one page.
The receiving number is the holding library of the telegraph operator's volume.
At twenty past nine I looked in the log for the entry at twenty past ten yesterday.
It says I took out the copy request form.
There is no entry of going to the fax.
There are four transmission slips. There is no fifth.
Nothing is left in this room of what went out.
At twenty to ten I looked again at the fourth page received.
On the top line are this room's number and twenty past ten.
The record of sending and the record of receiving have the same time.
The place that sent is this room, and the place that received is this room too.
At ten I opened the fourth of the fields I was handed.
The field for entries not remembered.
After the one before's three, I wrote nought.
Whether sending a fax counts as an entry, the procedure does not say.
It went out stamped with this room's number. What is stamped is written.
After nought I wrote one.
From twenty past ten to twenty to eleven I wrote four requests again.
For the pages requested I wrote the foreword and the afterword.
While I sent them I stood at the fax. I sent four and four transmission slips came out.
I ran off the transmission record again. Four.
From one to three, eight pages came.
I looked at the top line first. All eight are the holding libraries' numbers.
At three I read the forewords.
The foreword's heading is Editor's Note.
The lighthouse keeper's volume begins like this. This logbook is another set of records recovered by Pnakotic Press.
The surveyor's and the telegraph operator's volumes have the same sentence. Only field notebook and wireless log stand where logbook stands.
Only the librarian's volume differs. It says a librarian found it on a shelf while sorting.
That something came up while sorting is a word nearer the hand than recovered. Nobody went to look for it; it came up in the middle of the work being done.
In the foreword the publisher's name is written in Latin letters. On the colophon it is written in six characters. The same place written two ways.
At twenty past three I divided the forewords into fields.
There is the author, the year and place of birth. There is the place of work.
There is when the first set began and where it stopped.
There is when that place ceased to exist. There is which storehouse box the set came out of.
There is that the personnel records do not answer.
All four in that order. It is a form.
At twenty to four I looked for the field that is not there.
The one who recovered it.
The word recovered is there, and there is no place for entering the hand that recovered. In all four.
I wrote it in the margin. It is seventy-nine.
At four I read the afterwords.
The heading is Editor's Afterword.
All four have the same first sentence. The next page of this record continues, dated such-and-such a day.
All four have the same last sentence. The ten characters.
I counted the dates of the next pages. The lighthouse keeper, the eleventh of the same month; the surveyor, the fifteenth of the same month; the librarian, the eighteenth of November; the telegraph operator, the seventh of the same month.
The afterword only announces that date. The page for the announced day is not among the pages requested. I received only colophons, forewords and afterwords, so for the text I go by the four in the box.
At twenty past four I took out the handover procedure.
Handover papers record two things, it says.
What has been done so far, and what is to come.
The foreword records where the first set stopped. The afterword records when the next page continues.
Together the foreword and afterword are those two fields.
The same layout as this room's handover form.
At twenty to five I opened the box.
Seven articles. Seven impressions. The four hundred and eighteenth day.
The sixth box reads eight thousand one hundred and eighty-three. Yesterday the set's row was opened a hundred and thirteen times, seventy-nine by way of the imprint.
The right-hand material is six hundred and ninety pages. The page that grew is dated the sixteenth of May, ninety-nine. The third line of page five hundred and thirty-nine has been blank a hundred and ten days.
At five I opened the handover form.
The fifth field is the one receiving. There are eight Latin characters, and on the annex my name.
The sixth field is the one handing over. The name of the one before is there.
The foreword has no field for the one receiving. The afterword has no field for the one handing over.
In their place, at the end of the afterword, there are the ten characters.
At ten past five I sat in the chair and looked again at the fourth field.
The one before's three. Nought. One.
Beside that one I had written the time. Twenty past ten.
At that time I was taking out a form, and this room's fax was sending one page of something.
The two were in the same room in the same minute.
At twenty past five I counted the chairs.
One.
The fourth field has gone up by one.