Calvert Cyphrant

Calvert Cyphrant

"the Consentiary"

Posthumous portrait, c. 1870. The painter never saw the sitter and worked from the accounts of four keepers, which agreed in nothing but the coat. The face is therefore a majority reading, and is sealed.

Born	Disputed; no entry survives
Died	Not entered – the page was left unsealed[1]
Full name	Disputed (see below)
Published as	the Consentiary
Occupation	Compiler; corrector of proofs
Known for	The Incorrigible Register
Motto	Sine arbitro ("without an arbiter")
Standing
Office	Consentiary; of his own creation
Others holding it	None, before or since
In the Register	Living

Calvert Cyphrant (fl. 1840s–1868) was the compiler of the register of reluctant phenomena from which this encyclopedia descends, and the deviser of the method of sealing by which it was kept.^[2] He held that a record was worth precisely what its worst-intentioned keeper could not do to it, and set out to build one that no authority, however placed, could alter after the fact.

He succeeded. The consequence, which occupied the remainder of his life, was that the record could no longer be corrected either.^[3]

The compendium

Cyphrant's compendium was begun in the 1840s as a private list of reluctant phenomena – things reported at one position and found, on return, at another – and grew by the only method he trusted, which was to go and look again.^[2] An entry was admitted when he had verified it; verified a second time, because the first verification had been made in the evening and he distrusted the evening; and entered. An entry that failed at any stage was not amended but abandoned, and the page put back exactly as it had stood before he began. The evening was not put back.

The difficulty is plain, and he did not see it coming. In a compendium of things that decline to stay where they are put, verification is not a stage of the work that concludes. It is the work, and it has no end. The list outgrew him within four years, and he began looking for a way to make its entries stand without his standing over them.

The Register

His answer was to seal each page with a cipher computed from the page before it, so that no page could be altered without falsifying every page that followed; to keep the whole not in one place but in many identical copies, held by many keepers; and to settle disagreements between copies by counting them.^[4] Where the copies differed, the reading held by the most keepers was the true one. No authority adjudicated. There was to be no arbiter at all, which is what the motto says.

The Consentiary

The Register recognised no officers, this being the whole of its merit. It was built so that no man's say-so should matter, and so that nothing should depend on the character of whoever happened to be keeping it.

Cyphrant then invented a title for himself and signed every page with it.^[5] The office of Consentiary – the officer of consent – existed nowhere but in his own hand, was conferred by nobody, carried no duties that the Register acknowledged, and appears, sealed and unamendable, on every sheet of the work. He is not recorded as having noticed the difficulty. The historian Thomas Vogel observes that a machine built to need no trusted man will generally acquire one before it acquires anything else, and that the man is usually the one who built it.

Identity

That "Calvert Cyphrant" was a person has been doubted since the 1870s, on three grounds.^[6]

No one is recorded as having met him. No family of the surname is recorded anywhere in the kingdom, and the name sits oddly against a plain English forename – a mismatch offered as evidence by both parties, and settling nothing. And the initials, C. C., are of the form produced by his own cipher, which has led to the standing suggestion that the name is not a name at all but the seal of the first page, read as letters, and that the Register has been credited with an author it manufactured.

Against this it is urged that the argument proves too much, since the same cipher would produce a great many names. Scholars of the old legal formularies note a third possibility, which is that the name has the shape of the placeholders once used in pleadings – the names employed precisely when no particular person is meant.^[7]

The name has since been claimed by four men, and urged upon a fifth by his admirers. Each was invited to do the one thing that would settle the matter, which is to compute a seal in the hand that computed the rest.

Two declined, on a principle they did not state. The third produced a seal the honest copies would not accept; when this was demonstrated he produced a second, and then a third, each purporting to be older than the last, until a keeper recomputed them and found all three sealed upon a page that was not written until years afterwards.^[9] He held the keeper mistaken, the copies corrupt, and the cipher itself to have been altered against him, and went to law against all three. The court found the sheets made after the fact, and said so at length. His supporters hold the finding a narrow one, it having established only when the sheets were made and not who made them.

The fourth produced nothing at all, and is thought by his supporters to have proved the most by it.

The question cannot be settled, for the reason the reader will by now anticipate: settling it would require correcting the Register.

The last page

The last page in his hand is dated 11 March 1868 and is unfinished. The entry is written out; the seal is not computed; the sheet was left on the desk with the working shown to four figures and no fifth.^[1]

What follows is the consequence of his own arrangements. A death is entered like any other fact, on a page, which must be sealed. His was not, and no keeper would seal an entry in another man's hand, that being the rule which made the whole thing worth having. The Register therefore carries no record of his death, and a record which carries no record of a death carries the man as living. It cannot be corrected. By its own provisions, drawn by him, he has not died.

He was also, by then, the only keeper still sealing – the others having gone to the rival Registers, or to other work, or to their own unsealed pages. His last entries were carried unanimously by a majority consisting entirely of himself: a quorum of one, which the Register accepted, not being in the business of reasoning about numbers but only of counting them.^[8]

See also

• The Incorrigible Register – the record he could not correct
• Obscuripedia – the compendium's current form, still being kept
• Philosophical Nonsense Press – which struck the plates and, later, the copies
• Bavarian Society for the Study of Reluctant Optics – in whose orbit the register was kept
• Josiah Grimble – who also made a body proof against correction, by other means
• C. Fome – likewise known by an initial, and likewise not heard of after

References

1. ^ The unfinished sheet is reproduced in the Register at the place where the seal would be. The four figures of the working are legible; the fifth was never set down. Keepers of the rival Registers have offered completions, none of which the honest copies accept.
2. ^ On the compendium of reluctant phenomena and its descent, see Obscuripedia, which describes its founder as unrecorded, "or recorded, and since mislaid." Both are true, and by the same mechanism.
3. ^ The distinction between a record that cannot be corrupted and one that cannot be corrected is the whole of the subject, and was not drawn by anyone until it was too late to draw it usefully.
4. ^ On the seal, the keepers, and the counting of copies, see the Incorrigible Register.
5. ^ The signature appears from the first page. No instrument of appointment has been found, which the Register's defenders hold to be evidence that none was needed.
6. ^ The doubt is at least as old as the first rival Register, whose keepers had an interest in it, and has outlived the interest.
7. ^ On the formulary placeholders – the standing fictitious names of the old pleadings, used where no real party was intended. The resemblance is noted here as a resemblance.
8. ^ The Register requires a quorum of keepers to carry an entry, and counts them. It has no provision for the case in which the quorum and the keeper are the same man, that case not having been anticipated by the man who drew the provision.
9. ^ The rival Registers were divided on whether a claim to the name could be entered at all, a claim being a thing said rather than a thing measured. It was entered, and sealed, and is therefore permanent, which none of the parties had intended.