# 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