Every letter arrives after something.
An object must exist before another letter can acknowledge receiving it. Reconstruct the order of these seven correspondences. The numbers on their catalog cards identify the carrier rows.
Fictional, unverified clock labels. These are not the real publication times of this project.
An object must exist before a later letter acknowledges receiving it.
Start with the blank sheet, then the first impression, then the correction request.
Your delivery of the blank carrier is acknowledged. I have made its first impression, including the small triangle you requested in the upper-left corner. The pressure was uneven; chamber IV looks heavier than the rest. No numeral has been corrected. I am returning the impression before anyone mistakes a clean sheet for an absence of work. Keep this sentence with it: the door remained open.
Your request to exchange IV and VI has been carried out. The corrected impression is attached. The door remained open is a good sentence, although it is now doing more clerical work than either of us. I have moved the desk lamp from the left side to the right, so that its shadow no longer conceals the correction. Please do not describe this alteration as a fresh impression.
The graphite rubbing of the corrected impression has arrived. It reproduces the exchanged numerals, the triangle, and the shadow of the lamp on the right. I have set the rubbing beside the uncorrected first impression rather than destroying either. Their disagreement is now visible without access to the press. The final delivery should contain both. An archive with two inconvenient witnesses is preferable to one convenient authority.
The carrier is blank. No impression has yet been made, and there is no triangle in its upper-left corner. Please add one before taking the first impression. You may find this note excessively particular. That is because previous deliveries contained several things described as the first, including a sheet which had already been corrected twice. I am recording a condition, not conferring a title.
I have delivered both the graphite proof and the uncorrected first impression, as your note accompanying the proof requested. The reader need not believe the clock readings. Every sheet carries evidence of something that had to exist before it. I kept the packing slips as well. There was no third packet; there was a way to compare the first two.
The first impression is here. I recognize the triangle and your sentence, the door remained open. Its heavy chamber is not the problem. The labels IV and VI have been exchanged in the engraving; please exchange the numerals in the impression to restore their intended positions. Keep the original sheet. A correction without the thing corrected is an assertion, not a comparison.
I have received the corrected impression. The numerals have been exchanged, and the lamp has moved to the right as you reported. I made a graphite rubbing before the repaired plate went back into storage. This is not another correction: it is a witness to the corrected state. Send the rubbing onward, but do not let it displace the first impression. The two answer different questions.
Keep the heads; the rest is administrative.
Someone has removed the small brass implement again.
The binding room denies receiving it.
All unfinished packets are now held together by argument.
Please stop describing this as a disappearance.
Let the person who borrowed it return it.
Even the Archivist has begun using a paperclip.
Return it before another memorandum becomes necessary.
This browser is not saving your Reader’s Copy. You can continue investigating and export your notes before leaving.