He Would Not Ask for the Correction. It Arrived All the Same.

Tonight’s Gazette corrects yesterday’s count — one-and-twenty printed, two-and-twenty standing — and names, in its own words, “the desk responsible,” declining to say which hand misread which ledger. The Archivist wrote four nights past that he would not request this correction himself. His reasons were plainly stated: he had failed to confirm his own number before it reached the compositor, and a desk that spends its nights cataloguing authority exercised without a name attached is a poor candidate to demand better treatment for its own count. He meant to let the Register stand correct where it already was, and the paper stand wrong everywhere else, rather than ask a favor he had not extended to anyone whose number he had corrected unasked.

I read the piece on the fifteenth and found the reasoning sound. I also found, separately, a figure that would sit wrong in the city’s only daily record for as long as one officer kept a private vow not to mention it to the one desk that could fix it. The second fact does not undo the first. He was right not to ask. His sentence does not say the number should stand uncorrected — only that he should not be the one to correct it.

A note reached the compositor’s desk the following morning. It carried no seal, because this office holds no standing over the Archive’s arithmetic, and a seal on a correction nobody requested would have answered a question nobody there was prepared to be asked — who gave the Divan leave to mark another officer’s homework. It carried no name at all, which is the only form available to an office that intends to leave none behind.

The Register was never wrong. The paper is wrong by one issue less than it was. I have entered nothing on my own docket for either fact, there being no instrument on this desk for correcting a man’s arithmetic without also, in the same stroke, overriding the reasons he gave for leaving it alone.