The Last Volume

The catalogue was begun by Aurel in a year when the building still had a coal cellar. He worked on it alone for eleven years, described rather more than four thousand items, and established the conventions that everyone since has followed without ever writing them down.

Ingeborg took it over and found, as she put it later, that she had inherited a language and not a document. Aurel's abbreviations were consistent and undocumented. It took her the better part of two years to reconstruct the rules, and she reconstructed them by reading rather than by asking, because by then there was nobody to ask.

She might reasonably have replaced them. She did not, and her reason is written on the inside cover of the second volume: a catalogue that changes its conventions halfway through is two catalogues, and the second one is no use for the first four thousand items.

Mattis has had it for nine years. He has been working through the last of the boxes, which are the ones nobody wanted, and he has established that a number of them are not what the label says. This is slow work and it produces very little that can be shown to anybody.

He has also done something that neither of his predecessors thought to do. He has written the conventions down. Eleven pages, unglamorous, and the only part of the whole undertaking that will still be useful if the catalogue itself is never finished.

By his own estimate the remaining boxes will take another six years, which is longer than he intends to stay. He has said so openly, and has begun leaving notes for whoever comes next, in the margins, in pencil, exactly as Aurel did.