The Fallow Ledger
A quarterly newsletter, then an irregular one, mimeographed, print run somewhere between sixty and a hundred and ten. Eighty-four issues, Spring 1981 to Winter 1996. It is the single source for roughly two thirds of everything in this folder.
The position it was named for
The first issue argues, at length and rather well, that a tradition is mostly not doing anything, and that this is correct. Fallow is a farming word chosen deliberately: a field left unplanted is not a field being neglected, it is a field doing the thing it needs to do and cannot do while bearing.
The target was a specific irritation — the assumption, from outside, that a technical underground is measured by output. The Ledger's answer was that the compulsion to publish is what destroys these groups, because publishing forces you to have a position, and a position forces you to defend it, and the defending is what turns a craft into a faction.
That the newsletter making this argument then ran for fifteen years and eighty-four issues is a joke the editor made himself, in No. 40, and made badly.
What is in it
Tone tables, mostly. See lore/tone-tables: forty-odd pages of measured signalling frequencies across the run, which is more of the total wordcount than anything else and which almost nobody has read. This is the origin of marrow in lore/lexicon — the part everyone has copied and nobody has read past.
The rest, in rough order of how often it gets cited:
- No. 3 — the earliest lore/quiet-exchange account. Nobody has produced it since 1998. It carries the two-second gap and the forty seconds of silence, which is to say it carries everything that makes the story a story.
- No. 39 — the lore/halberd-and-ossuary exchange, printed in full.
- No. 41 — lore/the-specimen-card.
- No. 47 — "On Sitting", the standard statement on lore/long-count.
- Nos. 52–63 — the lore/gravewalker column.
- No. 62 — "Cold Comfort", on the 1989 lore/the-deprecation.
- No. 84 — the last issue, widely copied, and the only one most people have.
The condition problem
lore/sources sets it out and it is worth restating in the plainest form: the issues that are missing are not randomly distributed. Nos. 1–8 are the founding material and exist as one incomplete set that has been claimed and not produced. Nos. 64–83 are patchy and several are attested only by an index entry in somebody else's paper.
What survives well is the middle. What is thin is the beginning, which is where the origin stories are, and the end, which is where the group would have said what it thought had happened to it.
A tradition that keeps its middle and loses both ends will, reliably, be described by later readers as having been more coherent than it was.
The editor
Not named here, and not named in the Ledger, which carries no masthead in any issue anybody has seen. The convention of lore/marchford — record the plant, not the person — was applied by this publication to itself, thoroughly enough that fifteen years of quarterly work has no author attached to it.
lore/sisken contributed for nineteen years and is not the editor; that has been checked, and the checking is one of the few genuinely solid negative results in lore/lineage.