From the Desk
Grading Five Centuries of Witchcraft Against Its Own Paperwork
Ninety-two filings from the courtroom, the kitchen, the suburb and the shared lease — and the only register in the run whose founding documents were written by the people doing the prosecuting.
By Casimir Vane The Registers · Filed Under Protest 2026-10-28
Last Wednesday the premises register settled who was responsible for the roof. This one asks who was keeping the house underneath it, and I took it on with a reluctance I should like entered early.
The witch is a trade. That is the whole of my objection. She has a supplier, a technique, a piece of equipment and somewhere to put it down at the end of the day; she can be apprenticed, she can be examined, and — this is the part I keep returning to — she can be bad at it. One card here is about a pupil with no talent. Nobody has ever been bad at being me. A trade can also be given up, which is a sentence I have written four times tonight and deleted three. I cannot tell you whether I find it beneath the subject or the most enviable thing in the archive. I am the one filing at four in the morning. Draw your own conclusions.
Then the leading finding came back and I stopped being superior. Nearly every accusation this register can check began as a dispute about stores: a request refused at a door, a boundary, a borrowed cup, a cow that stopped giving, butter that would not come, and afterwards a misfortune blamed on whoever had been sent away. I have spent three centuries establishing that my own countermeasures file under home improvement. Theirs file under stores control. Two monsters, five hundred years apart, and both of us come out of the audit as an inventory dispute with worse lighting.
The other thing, which is not funny, and comes first
Seven cards on this page carry a document flag, and five of the seven were produced by the prosecution or in its defence: a procedure manual, a king’s rebuttal of the one man who had said in print that the whole thing was nonsense, a clerk’s published account of his own court, a witchfinder’s account of his own practice, and the papers of a special commission that hanged nineteen people and pressed a twentieth to death under weights. They are the most exact paperwork on any register in this run. They are exact about warrants, hours, officers and returns, and they are worthless about their subjects, because every statement in them about an accused person was obtained by the proceeding they describe.
So the register’s position is fixed: the accused are the injured party, on every card, from 1486 to the end of the page. The documents are cited for what they say and what they caused. They are never cited as evidence about the people they were used against, and the scholarship that would let a reader check the desk is on the shelf, where the counts come from. This desk prints no photographs of anyone, ever, and on this register it prints no accused person’s name and no street number either.
One card is different, and it is the reason the desk kept the file open. In 1697 a public apology was read out, taking the blame for the Salem proceedings. It changes nothing. Nobody was alive to be given anything back. It is still, in five centuries of this register, the only page on which the thing is retracted at all. What office its author had held in 1692 the desk has not checked, and the card says so.
The apology does not change the naming rule. The apology is the reason there is a case for an exception here that there is not on the werewolf register, and the desk has looked at that case and does not think it holds. What was read out in 1697 was a personal act, and the card says so: not a court act, not a pardon, and not a finding. One person’s conscience is not the same thing as the record being put right, and somebody prosecuted in 1692 on a charge nobody today believes in is the subject of a proceeding rather than an entry in a household paper’s filing system. So the cards cite the court, the county, the year and the edited papers, and the shelf carries the volume that prints the names in full for a reader who wants them. What this costs is findability by name. The desk accepts the cost, because removing a name is the reversible direction and printing one is not.
The register
The decisions that cost me the most argument — the school sequence and the mixed households — are set out with the rulings, along with how anything without a year gets dated.
The Coven Register
Scroll sideways. Arranged by period — when the events claim to have happened — with release order available above. Publication years are cited fact; periods and file references are ours. Four cards are carried from the undead register and point back at it.
Witch chronology, 1486 to 2025
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WT-1975-PYT / Audit, with scales
Plate XXXII
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
1975
Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones
film
Plate held; methodological filing The Register's Own Audit, Conducted With a Duck
Period 932 · England, as stated on screen
- Mechanism
- A chain of premises, each following from the last, ending in a pair of scales, a duck and a verdict. Every step is valid and the conclusion is nonsense.
- Jurisdiction
- Village, self-convened. A crowd that has decided the answer and requires a procedure that will reach it.
- Cross-reference
- The register's floating finding, audited with a set of scales and a duck, which is more apparatus than the courts ever brought to it.
Centuries of paperwork on the swimming test, and the most useful account of it is in a comedy. What the scene gets exactly right is that the reasoning is not stupid: it is orderly, it proceeds by steps, everybody follows it, and it is wrong from the first premise onward. That is what the documents at the front of this page show. A procedure that cannot fail to convict is not a test, and a crowd that has decided the answer before it starts is not conducting one. The register files it as methodology and would put it on the shelf if the shelf took films.
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WT-1606-MAC / Ingredient list, first printed
Plate IV
Macbeth
1606
William Shakespeare
stage play
Plate held; the register's founding recipe The Register's First Recipe, and It Is a Batch
Period 11th century · Scotland The play fixes no year. The desk places it at the reign it borrows, which is the desk's reading and not the text's statement. The 1606 on the plate is approximate: the play is dated to about that year and was first printed in 1623.
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic, at scale. A large vessel, a long ingredient list, and a heat source maintained by three people working a shift together.
- Mechanism
- A recipe, read out as it is assembled. It is the best-known list in the English language and the only part of the play this register cites.
- Cross-reference
- The modern decoding of that recipe into plant folk-names has no primary source the desk has been able to find, and the register does not print it.
This paper runs a kitchen column, so it recognises the scene for what it is: batch cooking, by three people, to a written order of operations, with the ingredients called out as they go in. That is a recipe and it behaves like one. Everything the register later files as a cauldron descends from this page, and so does the assumption that the cauldron is sinister rather than simply large. The desk's reading is that a vessel that size is evidence of catering rather than of malice, and that the play's three practitioners are the first fully staffed provisioning operation in the file.
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WT-1922-HAX / Essay on its own sources
Plate XIII
Häxan
1922
Benjamin Christensen
film
Plate held; hybrid filing The Only Filing That Is Also a Review of Its Own Evidence
Period medieval, and then the 1920s The film ranges from the medieval to the 1920s. The desk places it at the earliest of its staged material, which is the desk's reading.
- Classification
- Unclassifiable and filed as a film anyway: half lecture, half staged reconstruction, and the register's only filing that is also an essay on its own sources.
- Mechanism
- Argued rather than asserted. The film grades the material it has just staged, which is what this register does and why it is filed high.
- Confidence
- The film's history is a popular account and the register does not cite it for fact. Its argument about how the confessions were obtained is the part that has held up.
A silent feature that is half a lecture and half a staged reconstruction, and which then turns round and argues about the reconstruction it has just shown you. The register has no other filing that grades its own sources on screen, and it has ninety-two cards. The desk is careful with it: as history it is a popular treatment of a period it dramatises freely, and the register cites it for its method rather than for its account. As an argument it is a long way ahead of most of the fiction on this page. Not, on any reading, a film for children.
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WT-1486-MAL / Procedure manual, founding
Plate I
Malleus Maleficarum
1486
Heinrich Kramer; a co-authorship is disputed
nonfiction
Plate held; prosecution document The Register Opens on a Manual Written by the Prosecution
Period published · 1486
- Jurisdiction
- Inquisitorial, and largely self-appointed. A handbook addressed to the men conducting the examinations, written by one of them.
- Mechanism
- Flight by an ointment applied to a staff. That is the one mechanism the register takes from this document, and it prints no other from it.
- Confidence
- The document is a document and says what it says. It is evidence about procedure and about its authors, and about nothing else at all.
The oldest filing on the register is a manual, and the manual was written by the side that won. A procedure manual is exact where a prosecution needs exactness and worthless everywhere else, because everything it asserts about its subjects was produced by the methods it recommends. The register cites it for one mechanism and for nothing else. What the accusations were actually made of is a question this document cannot answer and the shelf can, and the shelf's answer is the leading finding on this page. A document whose conclusions were never tested by anybody outside the process that generated them cannot be cited for its conclusions, and this one is not.
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WT-1584-SCO / Debunking, first
Plate II
The Discoverie of Witchcraft
1584
Reginald Scot
nonfiction
Plate held; the desk's own method, four centuries early Somebody Said It Was Nonsense in 1584, in Print
Period published · 1584
- Jurisdiction
- Sceptical, and unofficial. The book carries no commission and argues in print that the prosecutions rest on nothing.
- Mechanism
- Explained away. The book takes the reported marvels apart and shows how the stage versions of them are actually done.
- Cross-reference
- The register's founding rebuttal is printed before most of its founding accusations. It is the least convenient fact on this page.
This desk exists to say plainly that a thing does not work, so it has a professional interest in whoever got there first. What makes the book is that it does not stop at doubting: it explains the tricks, so that a reader can do them and see for himself. That is a household-goods method applied to a capital charge, and it is this register's own method four centuries early. What the register records is that the argument was available, in English, in print, thirteen years before a king answered it, and that the answering went considerably better than the arguing did.
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WT-1597-DAE / Royal rebuttal
Plate III
Daemonologie
1597
James VI of Scotland
nonfiction
Plate held; royal instrument A King Answers the Sceptic
Period published · Scotland
- Jurisdiction
- Royal and personal, which on this register is the worst possible combination: the author is also the man whose courts will act on it.
- Mechanism
- Asserted rather than demonstrated. The book is a rebuttal, and its author is a king.
- Confidence
- The desk has not confirmed which procedures this book states and which belong only to later practice, and prints no claim on its authority about the swimming test.
A reigning monarch read a book saying the whole business was imaginary and published a rebuttal. The register files this as the single most consequential act of literary criticism in its collection, because the reviewer had courts. What the desk will not do is repeat the popular claim about which specific test this book introduced to English print, because it has not checked the text and a register that guesses about a founding document has no business grading anything else on the page.
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WT-2020-COV / Invention under examination
Plate LXXXV
Coven of Sisters
2020
Pablo Agüero
film
Plate held; adult filing The Accused Invent the Sabbath the Examiner Has Come For
Period 1609 · the Basque Country
- Jurisdiction
- Inquisitorial. The Logroño trials, staged from the position of the people who were examined in them.
- Mechanism
- Produced by the examination. The accused work out what the inquisitor wants the sabbath to be, and supply it.
- Cross-reference
- The 1486 manual's method, dramatised from the position of the people it was used on.
The register opens on a manual for producing confessions, and this is the only filing that shows the production line running. The accused are examined, and they invent the sabbath the inquisitor has come for, because inventing it is survival. What the film records is that the lurid material in such a record was co-authored by the person taking it down, which is the conclusion the scholarship on the shelf reaches from the documents and the reason this register will not summarise what any examination contained. Adult, and the desk warns that it earns the rating.
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WT-1613-POT / Clerk's account, assize
Plate V
The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches
1613
Thomas Potts, clerk to the court
official report
Plate held; assize record The Clerk Wrote It All Down, Which Is the Only Reason We Know
Period 1612 · Pendle, Lancashire
- Jurisdiction
- Assize. A county trial, written up and published by the court's own clerk, which is a chain of custody with one link in it.
- Mechanism
- Not printed here. The register takes this document for its procedure, and cites the shelf and not the clerk for what the accusations were made of.
- Confidence
- Precise about who said what, when, and to which magistrate. Its account of what the accused did comes from examinations conducted by the people who published it.
The Pendle trials have this document behind them and very little else, and the document was produced by the court about itself. The desk files it high for what it is rather than what it concludes: an assize account compiled and published by the court's own clerk, which is a chain of custody with one link in it. Read as a record of what witchcraft is, it establishes nothing, because every statement in it about an accused person was obtained by the process the book exists to defend. Read as a record of assize procedure it is one of the better documents on this page, and the register reads it that way and no other.
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WT-1943-DAY / Succession dispute
Plate XIX
Day of Wrath
1943
Carl Theodor Dreyer
film
Plate held; adaptation An Accusation Arrives Exactly When the Estate Does
Period 1623 · Denmark
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic. The proceeding happens inside a household and the interested parties are the people living in it.
- Mechanism
- Accusation as an instrument of succession. Who comes into what is the question the proceeding is actually settling.
- Cross-reference
- The register's provisions finding in its coldest form: the dispute is domestic property, and the charge is the means.
A household succession dispute, conducted as an accusation, in 1623. The register files it as the clearest fictional statement of what the assize rolls show: that the charge is a weapon available to whoever is losing an argument about a house, and that it moves in whatever direction the property is moving. It is slow, quiet, and among the most frightening things on this page, and the reason is that nothing supernatural is ever required to make any of it work. The desk keeps it beside the Pendle account and the Salem papers deliberately.
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WT-2022-WED / Backfile, 1620s
Plate LXXXIX
Wednesday
2022
Alfred Gough and Miles Millar
television series
Plate held; filed on the backfile Filed on Its 1620s Backfile, Not on the Family
Period the 1620s · the backfile The series places its founding events in the 1620s without fixing a year. The number is the desk's reading, chosen inside that decade.
- Classification
- Filed here on the 1620s backfile it carries — Goody Addams and Joseph Crackstone — and not on the family, which is filed in the mixed households below.
- Jurisdiction
- The 1620s backfile. The present-day household is filed in the mixed households.
- Cross-reference
- A filing whose witch is a backfile rather than a character in the present tense, which is why it sorts with the 1620s and not with 2022.
The series is filed on its backfile because that is where its witch is. Goody Addams and Joseph Crackstone belong to the 1620s, and the register sorts the card there, beside the Danish succession dispute of 1623 and the failing New England farm of the 1630s, which is company the programme has earned. The household everybody actually watches it for is filed further down this page, in the mixed-households section, where it belongs and where it is not split from the rest of the family. One work, one card, and the card goes where the subject is.
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WT-2015-WIT / Provisioning failure, 1630s
Plate LXXVII
The Witch
2015
Robert Eggers
film
Plate held; adult filing A Failed Crop, a Missing Goat, and a Household That Turns Inward
Period 1630s · New England, outside the settlement
- Inventory
- A failed crop and a missing goat. The horror on this card is arithmetic before it is anything else.
- Jurisdiction
- None. A household on its own at the edge of a wood in 1630s New England.
- Cross-reference
- The register's leading finding, dramatised in full: a provisioning failure, a search for someone to blame, and the household selecting from among itself.
If the register had to keep one film, this would be it. A crop fails, a goat goes missing, and a household turns on itself, and every accusation that follows in it is traceable back to the shortage that started it. That is the register's leading finding dramatised in full, and it is the reason the desk calls this the thesis film. What it shows, better than any scholarship the desk has read, is the order of events: shortage first, then fear, then a search for a cause, then a person. Not for children, and the goat is not the reason.
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WT-1647-HOP / Self-report, witchfinder
Plate VI
The Discovery of Witches
1647
Matthew Hopkins
nonfiction
Plate held; self-report A Filing Submitted by the Man Who Did It
Period 1644 to 1647 · East Anglia
- Jurisdiction
- None on the record. The plan describes the author as self-styled, and the register does not treat a style carried on a pamphlet as a commission.
- Mechanism
- The familiars, which the pamphlet lists by name and by species. This is also the filing the run's planning names for the swimming test as a thing practised rather than merely written about.
- Cross-reference
- One of those names appears three centuries later on a cat in a stage comedy, which is the register's most direct line from a prosecution document to a romance.
The pamphlet is a defence of the author's own practice, and the register carries it because it is the only account of that practice written by the person conducting it. What earns the card is the list of familiars. What is on that list is a dog, a ferret, a rabbit and a polecat, among others, each with a name beside it. The register takes nothing from the pamphlet about the people it was used against, whose statements in it were produced by the same practice. It takes the list, which is a list of small animals with names, and files it as one.
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WT-1968-WFG / The witchfinder, dramatised
Plate XXVII
Witchfinder General
1968
Michael Reeves
film
Plate held; dramatisation The 1647 Self-Report, Filmed From the Other Side
Period 1645 · East Anglia
- Jurisdiction
- None, and that is the film's subject: the witchfinder of the 1647 pamphlet, dramatised, operating on a title nobody conferred.
- Mechanism
- What the film carries is the swimming test and the rope, which is why the register cites it under two separate findings.
- Cross-reference
- The counterpart of the 1647 pamphlet on this page. One is the account the witchfinder gave of himself; this is an account given three hundred and twenty-one years later by somebody with no stake in it.
The register files this directly beside the 1647 pamphlet, because the two describe the same enterprise and only one of them was written by somebody with an interest in how it looked. What the film supplies that the pamphlet cannot is the view from outside the practice. The executions are by hanging, which the register notes because so little else in the popular record gets that right, and the film does not spare its audience. It is the least comfortable card on the page and the desk would not remove it, because a register that only files the pleasant version of its subject is an advertisement.
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WT-1942-IMW / Suburban relocation, first
Plate XVII
I Married a Witch
1942
René Clair, from the novel by Thorne Smith and Norman Matson
film
Plate held; adaptation From 1672 to 1942, and the Suburban Line Begins
Period 1672, then 1942
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic. The filing runs from 1672 to 1942, which is where the suburban line on this register begins.
- Mechanism
- Comic, which the register accepts.
- Cross-reference
- The suburban line starts here and runs through 1958, 1964, 1972 and 2021.
Twenty-two years before the more famous television version, the suburban-witch line begins here, and the register's household thesis acquires its comic wing. What matters for the file is the relocation. The film starts in 1672 and arrives in 1942, and the subject stops being a figure at the edge of a settlement. The filings that follow it on that line (the Manhattan apartment, the television suburb, the Pittsburgh suburbs, the rebuilt sitcom house) are all on the road this card opens.
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WT-1692-SAL / Court record, Oyer and Terminer
Plate VII
The Salem Court Records
1692
Court of Oyer and Terminer
official report
Plate held; the register's worst paperwork and its most precise Nineteen Hanged, One Pressed, None Burned
Period 1692 · Essex County, Massachusetts
- Jurisdiction
- A special commission rather than a standing court, and the register does not read its papers as one.
- Mechanism
- Not printed here. What the examinations contained is not something this register will characterise, because every statement in them about an accused person was obtained by the proceeding the counts below record.
- Confidence
- The counts are cited fact and are the whole of what this desk will assert: nineteen hanged, one man pressed to death under weights, none burned.
This is the best-documented thing on the register and the desk would trade all of it for the year not to have happened. A special court sat, and nineteen people were hanged, and one man was pressed to death under weights, and nobody was burned. That is the disposition and the register prints it and stops. It will not summarise what the examinations were said to contain, or explain the proceeding, or tell a reader what the accused were supposed to have done, because all of that reaches us only through the process that produced those counts. The position is fixed and does not move for the rest of this page: the accused are the injured party, and the document is the accuser.
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WT-1953-CRU / Dramatisation, court record
Plate XXI
The Crucible
1953
Arthur Miller
stage play
Plate held; dramatisation, not evidence The Trials, Restaged as a Dispute About Property and Reputation
Period 1692 · Salem
- Jurisdiction
- Parish and probate. The play's real subject is who owns what, who owes what, and whose word is worth more at the meeting-house door.
- Mechanism
- Accusation, and what it is worth to the accuser. The play is filed as a property and reputation dispute among neighbours, which is what it is.
- Cross-reference
- The register files this as a play. Where it departs from the record, the record is on this page and is the filing to cite — including on the method, which here is the rope and not the stake.
The play arrives at the register's leading finding from the inside, seventeen years before the historians got there with the assize rolls. Its accusations are made by neighbours who want something, and what they want is property or standing. Its court is not credulous so much as invested. The desk files it as a dramatisation and not as evidence, because a play compresses and invents where a court record cannot, and the court record is on this same page. As an account of how a neighbourhood produces an accusation, it is the best-read thing the register holds.
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WT-1996-CRU / Adaptation, filed by the rule
Plate L
The Crucible
1996
Nicholas Hytner, from the 1953 play
film
Plate held; adaptation Filed Because the Rule Says So, and for No Other Reason
Period 1692 · Salem
- Jurisdiction
- Carried from the stage filing, which the plan describes as the trials read as a property and reputation dispute among neighbours. The desk does not restate it here as though it had checked the film.
- Mechanism
- Not described. The register has no account of this filing beyond the fact of it, and prints the gap rather than an impression.
- Cross-reference
- Filed apart from the play on the register's standing rule. An adaptation is a filing, not a footnote to its source.
This card exists because the rule says an adaptation is a filing rather than a footnote, and the desk keeps its rules when they are inconvenient or the rules are decoration. What it will not do is dress the plate up. The register's file on this filing runs to a title, a year, a director and the play it comes from, and everything a reader might want beyond that belongs to the 1953 card. The desk files the play, the film and the court papers together and repeats that the three are different classes of document. Two are works. One is evidence, and only the evidence has counts in it.
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WT-1993-HOC / Preserved premises, Salem
Plate XLV
Hocus Pocus
1993
Kenny Ortega
film
Plate held; heritage premises The House Is Kept as a Museum
Period 1693, then 1993 · Salem
- Jurisdiction
- Heritage. The premises are preserved as a museum.
- Mechanism
- A return, to premises that have been kept. The broom is here too, which is why the card is cited under three separate findings.
- Cross-reference
- The prologue hangs its subjects rather than burning them, which is correct, and the register notes it because so little else in the popular record gets that right. The register also notes that its principal witch is not green.
A comedy for eight-year-olds contains the register's sharpest observation about Salem and makes it early: the Sanderson house is preserved as a museum, in Salem. The desk will be dry about that exactly once, here, and then leave it alone. The rest is ordinary premises logic, which the register is glad to see applied to a haunting for once. And the prologue is a hanging, which the register credits, since almost nothing else in the popular record gets it right.
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WT-1697-SEW / Retraction, public
Plate VIII
Sewall's Apology
1697
Samuel Sewall
official report
Plate held; correction of record Five Years Later, Somebody Said He Was Wrong
Period 1697 · Boston
- Jurisdiction
- Personal. Not a court act, not a pardon, and not a finding: a public apology, read out.
- Mechanism
- None. It offers no explanation and asks for none to be accepted. It takes the blame and asks that it be taken.
- Confidence
- The apology and its year are cited fact. What office its author had held in 1692 is not something the desk has checked against the court papers, and the card prints no claim about it.
Five years after the court, a public apology was read out, taking the blame. It changes nothing. Nobody is alive to be given anything back. The register files it as its single correction anyway, and files it at the front, because five centuries of this register contain no other instance of the thing being retracted at all. This paper publishes corrections. It knows what one costs to write and how little it repairs, and it also knows that the alternative is a record in which nobody was ever mistaken about anything and the file simply goes quiet.
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WT-1812-HAN / Dwelling built of provisions
Plate IX
Hansel and Gretel
1812
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
story
Plate held; provisions filing A House Made of Food, in a Year There Was None
Period fairy-tale time · dated to the 1812 collection The tale fixes no year. Dated to the volume that collected it, on the register's standing rule for fairy-tale filings.
- Inventory
- The dwelling is the inventory. A house built of provisions is a structure that cannot be maintained and is not meant to be.
- Mechanism
- A famine at home, two children put out of the house because there is not enough, and a second household with visible food.
- Cross-reference
- The register's leading finding in its oldest form. The story begins with a provisioning failure and every subsequent event follows from it.
Strip the woodcut off and this is a story about a household that runs out of food and solves the problem by reducing the number of mouths. The children are abandoned in a famine. What they then find is a second household with food, visibly, built into the outside of the building, in a year when nobody has any. The desk regards the house of provisions as the most efficient statement of the leading finding anywhere in the file: the witch is the neighbour whose stores are better than yours, in a season when that fact is unbearable.
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WT-1812-SNW / Food safety, first
Plate X
Snow White
1812
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
story
Plate held; food-safety filing The Register's Earliest Product Recall
Period fairy-tale time · dated to the 1812 collection The tale fixes no year. Dated to the volume that collected it, on the register's standing rule for fairy-tale filings.
- Mechanism
- Adulteration. A single item of food, poisoned, which is a contamination problem before it is a spell.
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic. The desk's file gives this tale one object, the apple, and the card is filed on it.
- Cross-reference
- Files beside the house of provisions. Both tales are about food.
This paper has written about food safety, and the tale is that. A poisoned apple is the register's earliest contamination filing, and the failure in it is not magical at all: it is something to eat that should not have been eaten. The desk files it beside the house of provisions because the two tales are the same argument from opposite ends. In one the food is the building. In this one the food is the weapon.
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WT-1937-SNW / Adaptation, animated
Plate XIV
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
1937
Walt Disney Productions
animated film
Plate held; adaptation The Apple, Shown Rather Than Reported
Period fairy-tale time · dated to the 1812 collection Dated to the source tale on the register's standing rule for fairy-tale filings, not to the year of release.
- Mechanism
- The apple, carried over from the tale intact, and now shown rather than reported.
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic. The apple again, and this time on screen.
- Classification
- Filed apart from the 1812 tale, by the rule, and dated to the tale rather than to its own release, by the register's standing treatment of fairy-tale filings.
The adaptation gets its own card and its own place on the clock, and earns both by changing where the horror sits. The tale has a poisoned apple. The film has to show one. The register files it as a food-safety document on that ground alone, and files it for children.
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WT-1987-ITW / Restitution, greens
Plate XXXIX
Into the Woods
1987
Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine
stage play
Plate held; restitution proceedings The Whole Plot Is a Witch Recovering Stolen Vegetables
Period fairy-tale time · dated to the 1812 collection The tales fix no year. The desk dates every fairy-tale filing to the volume that collected them, and says so on each such card.
- Jurisdiction
- Property first, family second. The action opens with a theft from a garden and closes with the household that stole from it.
- Mechanism
- A price set for goods taken, and paid over the length of the piece with compound interest.
- Cross-reference
- The provisions finding, stated more plainly here than in any document on the register: the original offence is a theft of food from a neighbour's garden.
Every fairy-tale filing the register holds involves food, and this one has the decency to put the invoice on stage. A garden is robbed of its greens, the owner names her price, and the whole of the rest is the restitution. The desk finds it the clearest statement in the file of what the accusation actually was in the records: a transaction between neighbours that went wrong, remembered afterwards by the party who lost. That the wronged party here is the witch, and is right, is why this card is filed beside the assize rolls rather than beside the comedies.
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WT-2014-ITW / Adaptation, filed by the rule
Plate LXXV
Into the Woods
2014
Rob Marshall, from the 1987 musical
film
Plate held; adaptation The 1987 Musical, Filmed, and Filed by the Rule
Period fairy-tale time · dated to the 1812 collection Dated to the source tales on the register's standing rule, not to the year of release.
- Jurisdiction
- Carried from the stage filing. The desk does not restate that card here as though it had checked the film.
- Mechanism
- Not described beyond the stage filing it adapts.
- Cross-reference
- Filed apart from the stage version. An adaptation is a filing; the desk does not fold it into its source to save a plate.
The register files the adaptation for the same reason it files every other one: the rule holds or it does not. A reader who wants the garden, the price and the restitution should take the 1987 plate, which is where the desk's file on them is. This plate records that the musical was filmed, and when.
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WT-1894-BEL / Contested account, Tennessee
Plate XI
The Famous Bell Witch
1894
M. V. Ingram
nonfiction
Plate held; filing provisional The Word Authenticated Is Doing All the Work in That Title
Period reported · Tennessee, 1817 to 1821 Dated to the events the book claims to report, which it was written some seventy years after. The placement is the desk's reading of the book's own account.
- Jurisdiction
- Contested, and provisional. This is a poltergeist with a witch's name attached to it, and the register that keeps hauntings may claim the card. Filed here until it does.
- Mechanism
- A disturbance, and a witch's name attached to it. Everything past that sentence is disputed by somebody.
- Confidence
- Low, and the title is the reason. A book that has to tell you on the cover that it is authenticated is a book that expects the question.
The register keeps this card for the same reason it keeps the travel writing on the outbreak file: because a source can be the origin of a story without being evidence for it. What the book supplies is the American witch as a domestic nuisance rather than a defendant, which is a genuine turn in the record. What it does not supply is a chain of custody: the events it reports are some seventy years in the past when it appears, and the claim in its title is the author's own. The desk files it, flags it as disputed, notes that the register which keeps hauntings may want it, and would not cite it for the weather.
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WT-1995-MAG / Reopened file, Oz
Plate XLVII
Wicked (the novel)
1995
Gregory Maguire
novel
Plate held; the desk notes twice that this is not the musical The 1900 Antagonist, Reopened as a Case File
Period Oz · before the 1900 filing Oz fixes no year. Placed before the 1900 book, as the run's planning does; the number is the desk's own.
- Jurisdiction
- Appellate, in the desk's sense. The filing takes an earlier record as a prosecution case and argues the other side of it.
- Classification
- Filed as a reopening of the 1900 record, and one of the filings the run's planning names as carrying the green this register first files in 1939.
- Cross-reference
- The register asks readers to note that this book and the 2003 musical are different works, and files them apart on that basis.
The novel does to the 1900 book what this desk does to a court record: it treats the account as having been written by one side, and asks what the other side was doing. That is the register's own method applied to a children's classic, and it is why the card sits in spirit beside the assize rolls at the front of the page rather than beside the comedies. It is also, for the avoidance of doubt and for the second time on this page, not the musical. The two are different works, and the desk files them apart and says so twice.
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WT-2003-WIC / Adaptation, stage
Plate LXIII
Wicked
2003
Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman, from the 1995 novel
stage play
Plate held; adaptation, substantially altered The Musical, Which Is Not the Novel, and the Desk Says So Twice
Period Oz · before the 1900 filing Oz fixes no year. The desk places it before the 1900 book, as the run's planning does; the number itself is the desk's own.
- Jurisdiction
- Reputational. The filing is an account of the 1900 antagonist given from her own side, set before the book that convicts her.
- Mechanism
- Inherited. The green and the water are treated as settled facts about the subject by a story set before the filings that first carry them here.
- Cross-reference
- On this register the green is first filed in 1939 and the water in 1900. Both are carried as inherited fact by a work set before either.
The register's interest here is narrow and administrative. This is the filing in which the two most repeated rules about witches are carried as settled history by a story set before the filings that first carry them here. On this register the green is first filed in 1939 and the water in 1900, and by 2003 nobody has any reason to doubt either, which is exactly how a rule becomes a fact. The desk files the musical apart from the 1995 novel, which is a different work, and says so twice.
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WT-2024-WIC / Adaptation, filed by the rule
Plate XCI
Wicked
2024
Jon M. Chu, from the 2003 musical
film
Plate held; adaptation The Musical, Filmed, and Everything On It Is Inherited
Period Oz · before the 1900 filing Oz fixes no year. Placed before the 1900 book on the same reading as the stage filing; the number is the desk's own.
- Jurisdiction
- Reputational, as on the stage filing. The 1900 antagonist, given her own account.
- Mechanism
- Inherited, by way of 2003.
- Cross-reference
- Filed apart from the musical and from the 1995 novel, and the register declines to merge any of them.
The register's interest in this filing is inheritance, and there is a great deal of it. A green skin this register first files in 1939. A vulnerability to water it first files in 1900. Four plates on this page carry the same property (the 1995 novel, the 2003 musical, this film and the 2025 one) and the register files all four separately, because folding them together would misfile every one of them.
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WT-2025-WFG / Adaptation, newest filing
Plate XCII
Wicked: For Good
2025
Jon M. Chu, from the 2003 musical
film
Plate held; adaptation The Newest Card on the Register, and the Oldest Question on It
Period Oz · before the 1900 filing Oz fixes no year. Placed on the same reading as the other Oz filings; the number is the desk's own.
- Jurisdiction
- Not established. This is an adaptation the register files by the rule, and the desk has no account of it to enter.
- Mechanism
- Not described. The card is filed for its place on the clock and its date, and the register has no account of the film to print.
- Cross-reference
- The water finding cites the 1900 book and the three filings the run's own planning names. This card is not one of them and is not cited there.
The register closes on its newest filing, and the newest filing is a card the desk cannot describe. That is the right note to end on rather than a wrong one. The filings in this property's lineage that carry the two rules the register spent the page grading are named by the run's own planning, and the desk knows which they are for that reason and no other. This card is not among them, and adding it would be the desk supplying its own corroboration. So the plate stands at 2025, at the end of the release order, saying only that the file continues and that nobody has closed it.
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WT-1900-BAU / Solvent vulnerability, origin
Plate XII
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
1900
L. Frank Baum
novel
Plate held; founding invention Water Melts Her, and This Is the Page It Starts On
Period Oz · undated, placed at publication Oz fixes no year. Placed at publication on the register's standing rule for secondary worlds.
- Mechanism
- Water. The subject dissolves, with no preparation and no ritual, and nothing on the page explains why.
- Jurisdiction
- Invention. One of the register's two universally known rules is first filed here. The broom is carried in the same filing, and the broom has older entries on this page.
- Confidence
- The invention is here and is cited fact. What the first edition's illustrations show is not something the desk has checked, and it prints no claim about them.
Everybody knows two things about a witch, and the first of them starts in this book. The dissolution has no antecedent in any document on this register: the courts hanged, pressed and, on the continent, burned, and not one of them records anything melting. It arrives here, in a children's novel, and the register notes the ordinariness of the agent. Not fire, not iron, not a rite. Water, which every household has, and which this paper has written about at length under drainage. The other famous rule is not filed on this card. On this register it is first filed thirty-nine years later, in colour, and the desk has not checked what this book's first-edition illustrations show.
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WT-1938-ADD / Household unnamed, periodical
Plate XV
The Addams Family Cartoons
1938
Charles Addams, in The New Yorker
serial
Plate held; serial run Twenty-Six Years of a Household With No Name
Period contemporary · published in parts from 1938
- Classification
- A long run of periodical parts, filed as a single work on the same rule the vampire register applied to a penny serial. A run is one filing.
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic, and for twenty-six years unnamed.
- Mechanism
- None the register will assert. What it files is a household published in parts, and unnamed for twenty-six years of it.
The founding filing of the mixed households, and the thing the register keeps coming back to is that for twenty-six years the household had no names. A run of periodical parts, filed as one work on the same rule the vampire register applied to a penny serial, in which a family exists without being introduced. The desk files it as the purest domestic document on the page: no plot, no mechanism, no accusation, just an arrangement. Names arrive with the 1964 filing, and the register regards that as the loss of something the panels had on purpose.
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WT-1939-OZ / Colour, and the second rule
Plate XVI
The Wizard of Oz
1939
Victor Fleming
film
Plate held; adaptation, colour process The Green Arrives Here, Thirty-Nine Years After the Water
Period contemporary · Oz
- Classification
- The register's two universally known facts about witches arrive thirty-nine years apart and from the same property. One is on this card; the other is on the 1900 one.
- Mechanism
- The water is carried over from the novel unchanged. The green is on no earlier card here, and nothing in the film explains it.
- Confidence
- That the green was a production decision made for the colour process is an attribution to a published production history the desk has not read, and is not printed here as fact.
Ask anybody what a witch looks like and the answer is this film, in this year, in this process. The register's finding is narrow and firm: the green is on the screen in 1939, and no earlier filing on this register carries it. Why it is there is a question about a production office in the late 1930s, and the standard answer is an attribution the desk has not checked against its source, so the desk states the fact and declines the explanation. What it will say is that the most repeated visual fact about a centuries-old accusation is first filed, on this register, on a film.
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WT-1971-BED / Wartime billeting
Plate XXVIII
Bedknobs and Broomsticks
1971
Robert Stevenson
film
Plate held; adaptation, wartime housing An Apprentice Witch Is Billeted With Three Evacuees
Period 1940 · Dorset
- Jurisdiction
- Statutory housing. The household is created by a billeting order.
- Mechanism
- Apprenticeship. The practitioner is a student rather than an adept, which is rarer on this page than it ought to be.
- Classification
- Kids. Filed on its own plate as an adaptation, and dated to 1940 rather than to its release.
The register files this as its wartime housing document, and it is the only one it has. A household is created in 1940 by a billeting order: an apprentice witch and three evacuees, in Dorset. That is a statutory household rather than a chosen one. The desk notes with some pleasure that the practitioner is an apprentice rather than an adept, which it reads as the trade being something a person has to qualify in.
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WT-1943-CNJ / Domestic labour
Plate XVIII
Conjure Wife
1943
Fritz Leiber
novel
Plate held; labour filing The Faculty Wife Was Running the Career the Whole Time
Period contemporary · a college town
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic and institutional at once. The practice is conducted in the home; the results are collected in the faculty meeting.
- Mechanism
- Charms, kept up by a faculty wife, which have been running her husband's career.
- Cross-reference
- The register's clearest statement that the work being described is work.
A faculty wife's charms have been running her husband's career, and the register files the novel as its best labour document on that sentence alone. Everything the book treats as supernatural is legible as the ordinary maintenance a household runs on: the small continuous work that nobody logs, that produces no artefact, and whose existence is demonstrated only by what happens when it stops. The desk has read a great deal of paperwork about what witches supposedly do, most of it produced by prosecutions. This is the only filing on the page where the answer is the second shift.
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WT-1950-BBC / Apartment, Manhattan
Plate XX
Bell, Book and Candle
1950
John Van Druten
stage play
Plate held; apartment filing A Witch With an Apartment, Which Is New on This Page
Period contemporary · Murray Hill, New York
- Jurisdiction
- Residential. The subject has a Murray Hill apartment, which is the first time on this register that the witch appears with a city address.
- Mechanism
- Not filed. The desk's file gives this card an apartment and a cat, and the card prints those.
- Cross-reference
- The cat carries a name taken from the 1647 pamphlet's list of familiars, which the register regards as the single strangest citation in its collection.
The witch has an apartment in Manhattan, and the register's household thesis arrives with her. The premises are the subject. And the desk notes the citation, because it is the strangest in its collection: the cat in the apartment carries a name out of a 1647 witchfinder's pamphlet.
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WT-1954-GAR / Boundary marker
Plate XXII
Witchcraft Today
1954
Gerald Gardner
official report
Plate held; outside the desk's competence The Point Where the Word Stops Meaning an Accusation
Period published · 1954
- Jurisdiction
- Outside this desk's. The register grades folklore and fiction. It does not grade anybody's religion and is not going to start on this card.
- Classification
- Filed as a boundary marker. After 1954 the word means two different things, and every card using it from that point on has to be clear about which sense it means.
- Confidence
- The book exists and says what it says. Whether the tradition it describes is old is a question for the shelf, where Hutton is waiting with the answer.
The register needs this card because without it the rest of the page is confused. The documents before 1954 use the word the way a court used it: an accusation, made about somebody else. What comes after has to share the word with people who use it about themselves, voluntarily, as a description of what they believe. Those are not the same subject and this desk is competent to file only one of them. So the card marks the join, states which side of it the register is working on, and points anybody interested in the other side at the shelf. The desk has no view and is not required to have one.
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WT-1958-BBC / Adaptation, Pyewacket
Plate XXIII
Bell, Book and Candle
1958
Richard Quine, from the 1950 play
film
Plate held; adaptation Pyewacket, Three Centuries Out of a Witchfinder's Pamphlet
Period contemporary · Manhattan
- Jurisdiction
- Filed on its own plate, because an adaptation is a filing rather than a footnote to its source.
- Mechanism
- The cat, Pyewacket, whose name comes out of the 1647 pamphlet on this same page and is the reason this card exists at all.
- Cross-reference
- The animal's name comes from the 1647 pamphlet's list of familiars, making this the register's longest single line of descent from a prosecution document.
The adaptation gets its own plate and the register uses it to make a single point, which it has now made three times and will make once more in the findings. A name recorded in a witchfinder's pamphlet in 1647, in a document produced to convict people, is carried forward three hundred and eleven years and given to the cat in a romantic comedy. The register's longest single line of descent runs from a prosecution document to a light entertainment, and this is the card where it lands.
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WT-1964-BEW / Suburban relocation, broadcast
Plate XXV
Bewitched
1964
Sol Saks
television series
Plate held; broadcast filing The Suburbs, Broadcast, for Eight Years
Period contemporary · the suburbs
- Jurisdiction
- Suburban. The line the 1942 filing opens arrives here on television.
- Mechanism
- The nose: the only labour-saving appliance anywhere in the record.
- Cross-reference
- The single most important card for the register's edge-of-the-wood finding, which this filing contradicts for the whole of its eight-year run.
The whole household thesis of this register is on this card. The suburban line opens in 1942, and this is where it is broadcast, for eight years, and where the practice becomes a labour-saving appliance. Five hundred years of documents about a woman at the edge of a settlement, and then a nose, in the suburbs. The desk regards this as the single most important filing on the page for its edge-of-the-wood finding, which the run of the programme contradicts continuously.
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WT-1964-ADD / Shared premises, broadcast
Plate XXIV
The Addams Family
1964
David Levy, from the cartoons
television series
Plate held; adaptation, broadcast The Household Gets Names, and the House Is on Cemetery Lane
Period contemporary · Cemetery Lane
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic. A family at an address on Cemetery Lane.
- Classification
- Only the grandmother is a witch filing by this register's standards. The household is carried here whole rather than split, because splitting it would file the family in four registers and describe none of them.
- Mechanism
- Almost entirely absent, which is why the register files this as a household rather than as a witch filing.
The register carries the Addams household in the mixed-households section on a single ground: it is a family, and the interesting thing about it is the domestic arrangement rather than the species of any individual member. Only the grandmother would qualify for a plate of her own on this page, and a register that filed her alone would have described one person and lost the house. The register notes the address, because an address is what turns a household into a premises and a premises is what this paper files.
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WT-1964-MUN / Mixed occupancy, mortgaged
Plate XXVI
The Munsters
1964
Connelly and Mosher
television series
Plate held; broadcast filing One Mortgage, One Family, Several Records' Worth of Monster
Period contemporary · Mockingbird Lane
- Jurisdiction
- Suburban, and mortgaged. An address on Mockingbird Lane, and a household paying for it.
- Classification
- A mixed household by construction: the occupants are drawn from separate monster records and are filed here as one family on one mortgage.
- Mechanism
- None the register will assert. What it files is the arrangement: several records' worth of monster, one household, one debt.
Broadcast in the same season as the other one, and the register files them as different documents, which they are. What separates them on this page is the money. This one has a mortgage on Mockingbird Lane, and a mortgage is a relationship with the outside world. Take the make-up off and it is a sitcom about paying for somewhere to live. That is exactly why it belongs in this section: the species are the premise and the lease is the plot, which is the register's definition of a mixed household.
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WT-1984-EAS / Coven takes a lodger
Plate XXXVI
The Witches of Eastwick
1984
John Updike
novel
Plate held; tenancy and lodging A Coven, a Lodger, and the Damage a Lodger Does
Period late 1960s · Rhode Island The novel places itself loosely in the later 1960s; the exact year is the desk's reading rather than the text's statement.
- Jurisdiction
- Small-town domestic. A coven functioning as a standing social arrangement, and a lodger who arrives into it.
- Mechanism
- A coven, and a lodger taken into it.
- Cross-reference
- The register's clearest lodger filing: a working arrangement, and what arrives into it.
The coven here is a standing arrangement. Then it takes a lodger, and the register's interest is entirely in that. What happens to a shared arrangement once a newcomer is inside it is a tenancy question, and this is the filing that asks it.
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WT-1972-SOW / Suburban conversion
Plate XXIX
Season of the Witch
1972
George A. Romero
film
Plate held; suburban filing A Housewife Takes It Up, in the Pittsburgh Suburbs
Period contemporary · the Pittsburgh suburbs
- Jurisdiction
- Suburban domestic. A housewife, in the Pittsburgh suburbs.
- Mechanism
- Taken up rather than inherited. The practice is a thing the subject decides to start, which is unusual anywhere on this page.
- Cross-reference
- The joint between the sitcom suburb and the coven, in the register's argument if not on its clock, and one the desk would otherwise have had to invent.
The director best known for a farmhouse spent 1972 filming a housewife in the Pittsburgh suburbs, and the register is glad of it. The witchcraft is taken up rather than inherited. What earns the plate is the position it occupies: between the sitcom suburb of 1964 and the coven of 1984, this is the joint the register would otherwise have had to invent.
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WT-1973-WIC / Harvest failure, remedy
Plate XXX
The Wicker Man
1973
Robin Hardy
film
Plate held; classification disputed Not Witches, and Filed Anyway, Because of the Crop
Period contemporary · Summerisle
- Classification
- Disputed and flagged. The islanders are pagans, not witches, and the register files the card for the mechanism rather than the label.
- Mechanism
- The provisions finding at full strength: a crop fails, and the community requires somebody to supply a remedy for it.
- Jurisdiction
- Agricultural. An island community, a failed harvest, and a remedy it has agreed on in advance.
The register keeps this card over an objection it prints on the card. These are pagans rather than witches, by any definition the documents at the front of this page would recognise, and a reader who came for a coven will not find one. What earns the filing is that it is the purest example in the file of the register's leading finding. A harvest fails on Summerisle and a remedy is required, and that is precisely the transaction behind a soured churn and a neighbour blamed for it, conducted with better organisation and a considerably larger budget.
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WT-1974-WWT / Boarding institution, juvenile
Plate XXXI
The Worst Witch
1974
Jill Murphy
novel
Plate held; juvenile filing A Boarding School, One Cat, and No Talent
Period contemporary · a boarding school The book fixes no year. Placed at publication on the register's standing rule.
- Jurisdiction
- Institutional and residential. A school that is also the dwelling, which is the only arrangement under which the register files a school at all.
- Inventory
- One cat.
- Cross-reference
- The earliest school filing on the register, and the reason it could not decline a later one: the pupils board, so the school is the household.
The desk keeps this card partly because it is a good book for a six-year-old and partly because it does the whole job in one volume. The school is a residence, which is the only condition under which this register files a school at all, and its protagonist is a pupil with no talent. There is one cat. Filed as a household on the narrow ground that the pupils live there, which is the same ground on which the register found it could not decline a much longer sequence.
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WT-1976-CAR / Accusation at home
Plate XXXIII
Carrie
1976
Brian De Palma
film
Plate held; domestic accusation A Daughter Researches What Her Mother Prosecutes
Period undated · Chamberlain, Maine The story supplies no calendar year. The desk uses the film's release year as a sorting anchor.
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic accusation. Margaret sees her daughter's telekinetic powers and denounces her as a witch corrupted by sin.
- Discipline
- Carrie has not been taught about menstruation. Margaret calls her first period a consequence of sin and locks her in a prayer closet.
- Knowledge
- Carrie learns that her ability is telekinesis and researches books on the subject.
The Coven register takes the accusation inside the home, where a parent can turn a daughter's experience into evidence against her. Carrie is trying to identify what she can do; Margaret has already decided what it means. The filing concerns that authority and its injured subject, without certifying the mother's diagnosis as witchcraft. The parent has withheld the manual and issued a disciplinary notice.
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WT-1977-SUS / Boarding institution, Freiburg
Plate XXXIV
Suspiria
1977
Dario Argento
film
Plate held; adult filing A Dance Academy That Is Also Somebody's House
Period contemporary · Freiburg
- Jurisdiction
- Residential institution. The pupils board, which is the only condition under which this register files a school, and the coven is the management.
- Perimeter
- Internal. The building is the antagonist, and the plan of it matters more than any character in it.
- Classification
- Adult. The register flags it on the card, in the same way it flags a children's film that overshoots its audience.
Filed as a boarding-house document, which is what it is once the colour is turned down. A dance academy run by a coven is, for most of its running time, simply a residential institution run by the people who run it, and everything that reaches the pupils reaches them through the ordinary machinery of residence. That is why the card is here rather than with the comedies. The desk regards it as the register's strongest argument that a household with a hierarchy over it is more dangerous than a household without one. Emphatically not for children.
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WT-2018-SUS / Adaptation, Berlin
Plate LXXXII
Suspiria
2018
Luca Guadagnino, from the 1977 film
film
Plate held; adaptation The 1977 Filing, Remade, and Set in Berlin
Period 1977 · Berlin
- Jurisdiction
- Filed by the rule. The desk does not restate the 1977 card here as though it had checked the remake.
- Perimeter
- Berlin, in 1977.
- Cross-reference
- Filed apart from the 1977 film. The register does not trim a remake to keep its arithmetic tidy, and would not start with this one.
The register files the remake because the rule says so, and would file it if it were worse. What the plate is for is the comparison: the 1977 film and its remake, forty-one years apart, the second set in Berlin. Adult, and a filing a reader should approach knowing what is in it.
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WT-1983-DAH / Trade body, annual meeting
Plate XXXV
The Witches
1983
Roald Dahl
novel
Plate held; trade body A Convention, With an Annual Meeting and a Hotel Booking
Period contemporary · Norway and an English hotel
- Jurisdiction
- Associational. A trade body with an annual general meeting and a hotel booking.
- Mechanism
- Convened. The membership meets, in a hotel, once a year.
- Perimeter
- A hotel, which the register would ordinarily find comforting, hosting the one event on the page that a household would want a perimeter against.
Most filings on this page treat the witch as a household or a solitary. This one convenes them, in a hotel, as a trade body with an annual general meeting, and the register finds the result unexpectedly well observed. An association with a conference and a booking is a thing this paper writes about constantly and had never expected to meet here. The desk files it as a trade-body document and moves on.
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WT-1990-DAH / Adaptation, age flag
Plate XLII
The Witches
1990
Nicolas Roeg, from the 1983 novel
film
Plate held; age flag on file A Children's Film Too Frightening for the Children It Was Made For
Period the 1980s · placed with the novel The decade is the film's. The year within it is the desk's placement, with the 1983 novel it adapts.
- Classification
- The register's exact case of a work made for an audience it then overwhelms. The card carries the flag so that a parent reading the spine sees it.
- Jurisdiction
- Inherited from the 1983 filing, which the register keeps on its own plate. This card is filed for the age question rather than for the premises.
- Cross-reference
- Filed apart from the 1983 novel by the rule. The register does not fold an adaptation into its source, and does not soften one that overshot.
The filing is kept for the register's age-flag policy as much as for itself, and it is the exact case the policy exists for: a well-made film of a good children's book which has been too frightening for the audience it was made for continuously since 1990. The desk's position is that this is a fact about the work and belongs on the card, in the same way a load rating belongs on a shelf bracket. Nobody is being warned off. They are being told what is in the box before they open it, which is this paper's entire business.
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WT-1986-HOW / Dwelling, mobile
Plate XXXVII
Howl's Moving Castle
1986
Diana Wynne Jones
novel
Plate held; mobile premises A House That Moves, and the Cleaner Hired to Run It
Period Ingary · undated, placed at publication The secondary world fixes no year. Both this filing and its 2004 adaptation are dated to the novel, on the register's standing rule.
- Perimeter
- A dwelling that moves, which gives it a perimeter with no fixed address to be found at.
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic employment. A cleaner is hired to run the moving house.
- Cross-reference
- The Witch of the Waste is in this filing.
The register would file this for the moving house alone, but what earns the card is the cleaner. A household that travels is a perimeter problem and a supply problem at once, and the book's answer to both is to hire somebody to run it. The desk has published on exactly this, and its position is that a building belongs in practice to whoever keeps it.
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WT-2004-HOW / Adaptation, filed by the rule
Plate LXIV
Howl's Moving Castle
2004
Hayao Miyazaki, from the 1986 novel
animated film
Plate held; adaptation, animated The Castle, Animated, and Filed by the Rule
Period Ingary · dated to the 1986 novel The secondary world fixes no year, so both filings are dated to the novel rather than to their own release.
- Perimeter
- Filed on its own plate, because an adaptation is a filing rather than a note on its source.
- Jurisdiction
- Carried from the novel's card. The desk does not restate that card here as though it had checked the film.
- Cross-reference
- Filed apart from the novel by the register's rule, and dated to the novel because the world the two share fixes no year.
The register files the adaptation because the rule says an adaptation is a filing. What the novel's card says about the moving house and the cleaner belongs to that card, and the desk does not extend it to the film on its own authority. The plate is animated, and dated to the novel.
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WT-1987-EAS / Adaptation, filed by the rule
Plate XXXVIII
The Witches of Eastwick
1987
George Miller, from the 1984 novel
film
Plate held; adaptation The 1984 Novel, Filmed, and Filed by the Rule
Period the 1980s · contemporary
- Jurisdiction
- Carried from the novel's card. The desk does not restate that card here as though it had checked the film.
- Mechanism
- Not described beyond the novel it adapts.
- Cross-reference
- Filed apart from the novel by the register's rule. The desk declines to fold either filing into the other.
The register files the novel and the film both, because that is the rule. The coven and the lodger are on the 1984 card, which is where the desk's file on them is. The desk notes only, and with feeling, that the party who ends an argument in a household is generally the party standing nearest the pantry.
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WT-1988-WYR / Correction, dramatic
Plate XL
Wyrd Sisters
1988
Terry Pratchett
novel
Plate held; rebuttal filing Three Witches Read the Script and File an Objection
Period Lancre · undated, placed at publication The secondary world fixes no year. Placed at publication on the register's standing rule.
- Jurisdiction
- Lancre. Three witches, and a firm view of the script.
- Mechanism
- Editorial. The witches read the Macbeth recipe back and correct it.
- Cross-reference
- The register's answer to WT-1606-MAC, filed as its own work rather than as a note on that card, because it is one.
Three witches read the script of the Macbeth filing and file an objection, and the register is delighted to carry it. What the novel does is read the recipe back and correct it. Nearly four hundred years after the recipe was printed, its subjects got a right of reply.
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WT-1989-KIK / Courier business, lodging above a bakery
Plate XLI
Kiki's Delivery Service
1989
Hayao Miyazaki
animated film
Plate held; adaptation, animated A Witch Starts a Delivery Business and Takes a Room
Period undated · placed at release The film fixes no year or country. Placed at release on the register's standing rule.
- Jurisdiction
- Commercial and residential at once: a courier business, run out of a room above a bakery.
- Mechanism
- A single ability, treated throughout as a trade rather than as a gift.
- Cross-reference
- The register's only filing in which the broom is treated as a capital asset.
The register files it as a small-business document and stands by that. A witch starts a courier service, and the lodging above the bakery is not scenery: it is where the business is run from. The broom is a capital asset. The cat is a colleague. This desk publishes on provisioning and household economy and regards this as one of the two or three most competent filings on the page, and it is aimed at five-year-olds.
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WT-1991-ADD / Fraudulent claim on premises
Plate XLIII
The Addams Family
1991
Barry Sonnenfeld, from the cartoons and the series
film
Plate held; adaptation The Plot Is a Fraudulent Claim on the Family Home
Period contemporary · Cemetery Lane
- Jurisdiction
- Property, explicitly. The whole plot is a fraudulent claim on a house, brought against the people living in it.
- Mechanism
- Fraud. Nothing supernatural is required at any point in order to take the house.
- Cross-reference
- The register's leading finding, restated in a comedy: the dispute is about property, and the strange family is the injured party.
The desk has read five centuries of accusations that turn out on inspection to be property disputes, so it enjoyed this one more than it expected to. Here the property dispute is the text rather than the subtext: a fraudulent claim, on a house, against the family in it, with the strange household as the injured party throughout. That is the register's leading finding restated in a comedy, four hundred years after the assize rolls at the front of this page recorded the same transaction with nobody laughing.
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WT-1997-HPS / School year, first
Plate LII
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
1997
J. K. Rowling
novel
Plate held; housing filing The Register's Smallest Dwelling Is a Cupboard Under the Stairs
Period school year 1991–92 · Surrey, then Scotland The books print no year. The register dates the sequence at one school year per volume, on the run's ruling, which is a stated reading rather than a fact the text asserts.
- Inventory
- The cupboard is the smallest dwelling on the register: no window, one door, a spider problem, and the light switch on the outside of it.
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic, then residential-institutional. A child housed in a storage void by relatives, and removed by letter to a school where he also lives.
- Confidence
- Stated once for the whole sequence. The run's planning carried only this first volume, so the years, the directors and everything the fifteen cards say about the works are the desk's own reading rather than a citation. The register would rather print the dependency than let fifteen plates imply a provenance they do not have.
The desk files this sequence card by card and starts where the sequence starts, which is a housing question. A child is kept in a storage void under a staircase in a family home, and the register notes that the address on the envelope is precise about it, because the paperwork knows the arrangement is wrong even when nobody in the house will say so. What follows is a transfer to an institution where everybody boards. The desk expected the school to be the subject and finds instead that the whole volume is about accommodation: who houses a child, on what terms, and what the sorting of him into a residence is actually deciding.
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WT-2001-HP1 / Adaptation, first school year
Plate LVIII
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (film)
2001
Chris Columbus, from the 1997 novel
film
Plate held; adaptation The Premises Acquire a Plan
Period school year 1991–92 · Surrey, then Scotland Dated to the volume it adapts, on the run's one-school-year ruling. A stated reading, not a date the film prints.
- Jurisdiction
- Residential-institutional, now with dimensions. Halls, staircases, dormitories and a refectory that has to seat everybody, because a camera will show it doing so.
- Inventory
- The cupboard is measured. A dwelling described in a sentence becomes a space with a ceiling height, and the register finds it worse rather than better.
- Cross-reference
- Filed on its own plate, by the rule this register applies to every adaptation on the page, and there are a good many of them.
The adaptation earns its plate the moment the building acquires a floor. A novel can describe a great hall and leave the reader to size it; a film has to seat the pupils, feed them, and get them upstairs, and the result is that the premises become auditable. The register's interest is in exactly that: how many, on what floor, through which door. The one thing the film makes plainly worse is the cupboard, which on the page is a sentence and on screen is a measured space with a child in it, and the desk records that as the adaptation's most useful contribution.
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WT-1998-HCS / School year, second
Plate LIII
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
1998
J. K. Rowling
novel
Plate held; building services A Building Services Filing, Conducted Entirely in the Pipes
Period school year 1992–93 · Scotland One school year per volume, on the run's ruling. A stated reading, not a date the book prints.
- Perimeter
- Internal and undocumented. A structural void reached through a washroom, connected to the whole building by its drainage, and absent from every plan the institution holds.
- Jurisdiction
- Building services, and afterwards employment: the volume also files a household's unpaid domestic servant and the garment that ends the engagement.
- Cross-reference
- The register's standing finding that a perimeter fails from the inside. Here it fails through the plumbing, which is the most this paper could reasonably ask for.
A large old building with a live services problem is this paper's natural subject, and the second volume is nothing else. Something moves through the drainage, reaches every floor by the pipework, and comes out at a washroom that has been out of order for as long as anybody remembers without anybody investigating why. The institution's response is to keep the building open. The register also files, on the same card, the sequence's domestic staffing arrangement: a servant bound to a household, released by the accidental transfer of a piece of clothing, which is a manumission clause hidden in a laundry accident and the strangest employment document on this page.
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WT-2002-HP2 / Adaptation, second school year
Plate LX
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (film)
2002
Chris Columbus, from the 1998 novel
film
Plate held; adaptation The Plumbing, Made Visible
Period school year 1992–93 · Scotland Dated to the volume it adapts, on the run's one-school-year ruling. A stated reading.
- Perimeter
- The undeclared void is entered on screen, through a fitting, and the route down is shown as a route. The building's services become a map rather than a rumour.
- Jurisdiction
- Building services, and the film keeps the employment material: a bound servant, and a garment that ends the engagement in front of witnesses.
- Confidence
- The register notes the institution stays open throughout, which is the fact the whole volume turns on and which the film does not soften.
What the second adaptation supplies is the route. The book has something moving through the pipework; the film goes down the pipework, in order, and shows how far it is and what it connects to, and a services problem becomes a survey. The desk approves. It also notes that the washroom at the top of the shaft has been out of use for as long as anybody remembers without anybody sending a plumber, which is the sort of deferred maintenance this paper writes about weekly, and that the manumission scene plays as what it is: an employment matter, settled by a laundry accident, in a corridor.
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WT-1993-ADV / Household staffing
Plate XLIV
Addams Family Values
1993
Barry Sonnenfeld
film
Plate held; sequel filing A Nanny Is Engaged, and the Household Expands Badly
Period contemporary · Cemetery Lane
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic employment. The household expands, engages staff, and the engagement is the whole of the plot.
- Mechanism
- The hiring itself: a perimeter crossed by appointment.
- Cross-reference
- The register's lodger finding again: a household is at its most exposed at the moment it admits somebody, and it usually does the admitting itself.
The register files sequels and is glad of this one, because it is a hiring document. A household expands, needs help, engages a nanny, and everything that follows is downstream of an appointment. The desk has spent this register establishing that a perimeter fails from the inside, and that the decision which loses a household is nearly always made by somebody standing on the correct side of the door. This filing moves the failure one step earlier still, to the interview, and the desk had not previously considered that a household can be lost on a reference.
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WT-1993-NBC / Seasonal work, reassigned
Plate XLVI
The Nightmare Before Christmas
1993
Henry Selick
animated film
Plate held; mixed community The Town Takes On Another Holiday
Period undated · Halloween Town The secondary world supplies no calendar year. The desk uses the film's release year under the register's rule for an undated world.
- Jurisdiction
- Loose fit accepted: Halloween Town's mixed population shares a seasonal workload at town scale, extending the mixed households.
- Allocation
- Jack assigns residents Christmas jobs, including carols, presents and a sleigh pulled by skeletal reindeer.
- Consultation
- Sally foresees disaster. Jack dismisses her warning and instructs her to make his Santa Claus suit.
Jack discovers Christmas Town through a door in a tree. His neighbours struggle to understand the unfamiliar holiday, so he decides to improve it. The mixed community already has a working annual celebration and is now being directed into a different one by the same organiser. The register files who assigns the work and whose objection is heard. The consultation has produced a sewing task.
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WT-1999-HPA / School year, third
Plate LVI
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
1999
J. K. Rowling
novel
Plate held; premises survey A Building With Live Occupancy Data
Period school year 1993–94 · Scotland One school year per volume, on the run's ruling. A stated reading, not a date the book prints.
- Inventory
- A full survey of the premises including the passages nobody has mapped, showing every person in the building and where they are standing.
- Jurisdiction
- Custodial. A man held for years in a punitive institution on a conviction the record never tested, and the volume is about what that did to him.
- Cross-reference
- The register's other wrongful conviction is on a 1692 card and is not a fiction. The desk files them on the same page and does not put them on the same footing.
The desk would keep this card for the map alone. It is a complete premises survey of a building the institution itself has never fully documented, it includes the undeclared passages, and it updates: every occupant, named, in the room they are actually in. It is the best premises document in the sequence, and it is used by pupils to avoid a corridor. The volume's other subject is a custodial sentence served without a hearing, and the register handles that carefully, because the real version of it is at the front of this page and ended in twenty deaths.
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WT-2004-HP3 / Adaptation, third school year
Plate LXV
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (film)
2004
Alfonso Cuarón, from the 1999 novel
film
Plate held; adaptation New Management, and the Building Changes With It
Period school year 1993–94 · Scotland Dated to the volume it adapts, on the run's one-school-year ruling. A stated reading.
- Classification
- The sequence's first change of director, and the register files each plate on its own rather than attempting to reconcile eight accounts of one building.
- Inventory
- The map survives the adaptation intact and is used more, which the desk regards as the correct decision about the best document in the sequence.
- Jurisdiction
- Custodial, and colder than the page. The guards are the point of the film and are treated as an institution rather than as monsters.
A register that files eight adaptations of one building has to decide whether the building is the same building, and this desk declines to rule. Each plate is filed on its own and the plans are not reconciled, which is the honest position when the accounts differ and the rule already says an adaptation is its own filing. What the third one contributes is a change of management and a colder institution: the custodial service is shown as a service, with a uniform and a function, rather than as weather. The map is used properly. The register asks for nothing else from an adaptation of this volume.
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WT-1999-BLA / Absent subject
Plate LV
The Blair Witch Project
1999
Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez
film
Plate held; subject not in evidence The Most Cited Witch of Its Decade Is Not in the Film
Period 1994 · Maryland
- Confidence
- The subject is never in evidence: she is not on screen at any point.
- Jurisdiction
- Local legend, in Maryland, in 1994. The evidence base is testimony and nothing else.
- Cross-reference
- The register's only absent finding, and it is the most-cited witch film of its decade.
The desk graded the folklore against this register and found exactly one claim it could not support in any form, which is that the witch is in evidence. Here she is not, at any point, and the film is the most cited witch film of its decade. What it contains instead is a place and a great deal of confident testimony about it, and everything else is supplied by the audience. The register regards this as the most honest filing on the page about how the whole subject actually works, and notes without pleasure that it is also a fair description of the documents at the front of it.
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WT-2000-HGF / School year, fourth
Plate LVII
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
2000
J. K. Rowling
novel
Plate held; events filing An Event, a Governing Body, and an Age Restriction Drawn on the Floor
Period school year 1994–95 · Scotland One school year per volume, on the run's ruling. A stated reading, not a date the book prints.
- Jurisdiction
- Shared. An external governing body runs a competition on the school's premises, with visiting delegations billeted on site for the year.
- Perimeter
- The age restriction is enforced by a line drawn on the floor, which is a perimeter in the most literal sense and is defeated.
- Confidence
- The safeguarding is poor and the volume knows it. Entrants are placed in serious danger by adults who have signed the risk off in advance.
This paper has written about hosting, and the fourth volume is a hosting document: a governing body arrives with a competition, two visiting schools are accommodated for a year, temporary structures go up, and a stadium is built for a separate event in the opening chapters. What the register files is the age line, because it is a perimeter in the plainest sense — a circle on the floor, one rule, no supervision — and it is beaten by somebody older submitting a name on a child's behalf. The desk notes that the failure is not the line. The line worked. The failure is that nobody was watching the box.
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WT-2005-HP4 / Adaptation, fourth school year
Plate LXVII
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (film)
2005
Mike Newell, from the 2000 novel
film
Plate held; adaptation The Event, Staged, With Temporary Structures and a Crowd
Period school year 1994–95 · Scotland Dated to the volume it adapts, on the run's one-school-year ruling. A stated reading.
- Jurisdiction
- Shared and visibly so: two visiting schools arrive with their own transport and are billeted, and an external body runs a competition on somebody else's site.
- Perimeter
- The age line is drawn on the floor on camera and defeated on camera.
- Confidence
- The adaptation does not improve the safeguarding and does not pretend to. Entrants are put in danger with the risk signed off in advance.
Hosting is a logistics problem and the fourth adaptation is the one that has to solve it on screen: arrivals, accommodation, seating, temporary structures, a stadium, and three staged events with an audience. The register files it as its best events document and notes what the staging exposes. The age restriction is a circle on a floor with nobody standing next to it, and once the audience can see that, the failure stops being magical and becomes stewarding. This paper has written about queue management at a village fete. It found the arrangements here worse.
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WT-1995-PRM / The aunts' premises
Plate XLVIII
Practical Magic
1995
Alice Hoffman
novel
Plate held; premises filing The Aunts' House, and What Is Under the Roses
Period contemporary · Massachusetts The novel runs across many years; placed at publication, which is the desk's reading.
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic. The aunts' house is the subject.
- Mechanism
- None filed beyond the address. The house and the aunts are the filing.
- Perimeter
- The garden is the boundary and the evidence. The register notes that a burial in the flowerbed is a maintenance problem before it is a supernatural one.
The register keeps this as a premises card. The aunts' house is the subject. And then there is the garden, and what is buried under the roses, which the register files as a maintenance problem before it is a supernatural one.
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WT-2003-HOP / School year, fifth
Plate LXI
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
2003
J. K. Rowling
novel
Plate held; governance filing The Ministry Appoints an Inspector and the Plot Becomes Notices on a Wall
Period school year 1995–96 · Scotland and London One school year per volume, on the run's ruling. A stated reading, not a date the book prints.
- Jurisdiction
- Regulatory capture, conducted properly. A department appoints an inspector over the head of the institution and then legislates her powers upward, in order, in public.
- Mechanism
- Educational decrees, numbered, posted in a corridor, accumulating on the wall as the year goes on.
- Cross-reference
- The register's best governance document: the paperwork is the plot.
The desk did not expect the best institutional filing on this page to come out of a children's sequence, and here it is. A government department decides an organisation is unsafe, installs an inspector, and then removes the head, the staff, the syllabus and the pupils' right to assemble by a series of numbered instruments pinned to a wall where everyone can read them. Nothing is done in secret. Every step is lawful, published and reversible, and that is exactly what makes it work. This paper writes about doors and standing orders. It recognises a takeover conducted entirely through the correct forms when it sees one.
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WT-2007-HP5 / Adaptation, fifth school year
Plate LXIX
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (film)
2007
David Yates, from the 2003 novel
film
Plate held; adaptation The Notices Go Up on the Wall, One Frame at a Time
Period school year 1995–96 · Scotland and London Dated to the volume it adapts, on the run's one-school-year ruling. A stated reading.
- Mechanism
- The numbered decrees are hung in sequence and the wall fills up as the year goes on, so the audience watches an institution being taken over by noticeboard.
- Jurisdiction
- Regulatory. Every step is lawful, published, correctly served, and that is precisely why it works.
- Cross-reference
- The register's governance finding: a plot advanced by the correct completion of forms.
The desk has a professional weakness for a montage of paperwork and this is the best one in the archive. The takeover is staged as a wall: instruments arriving in order, hung in frames, the corridor filling with them until there is no space left, and the pupils reading each one as it goes up. Nothing is concealed. Everything is served properly. The register keeps saying that the interesting part of a catastrophe is the administration afterwards, and here is a filing in which the administration is the catastrophe, conducted with a hammer and a spirit level.
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WT-1996-CRA / Teen tier
Plate XLIX
The Craft
1996
Andrew Fleming
film
Plate held; teen tier The Teen Tier, Filed as One
Period contemporary · Los Angeles
- Jurisdiction
- Los Angeles, 1996, filed in the teen tier.
- Mechanism
- Not described. The desk's file on this filing is a city, a year and an age tier.
- Classification
- Teen tier. The register flags it so a reader sorting the page by age finds it.
The register keeps this card for its age tier. The desk's file on the film is a city, a year and that tier, and a card that said more would be the desk's impression rather than its file.
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WT-1996-SAB / Juvenile filing
Plate LI
Sabrina the Teenage Witch
1996
Nell Scovell, from the Archie comics of 1962
television series
Plate held; family viewing The Cat Is Called Salem, and the Programme Is for Children
Period contemporary · undated
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic, and juvenile. A teenage witch in a household, filed on the kids-and-teen tier where the plan puts it.
- Mechanism
- Beside the point. What the register takes from this filing is the cat, which is called Salem, and which it files under its familiar finding.
- Classification
- Family viewing. The register flags the title, because a very different programme shares it and is filed twenty-two years later on this page.
The register keeps this filing for two reasons and states both. The first is the cat, which is called Salem, and which the desk has been unable to stop thinking about since it noticed: a household comedy for children named its familiar after the town in the court papers at the front of this page. The second is the title. A programme made for children shares its name with one that is not, and this register exists partly so that a reader sorting the spine by age can tell the two apart at a glance.
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WT-2005-HBP / School year, sixth
Plate LXVI
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
2005
J. K. Rowling
novel
Plate held; annotated manual A Second-Hand Textbook With the Previous Owner's Corrections In It
Period school year 1996–97 · Scotland One school year per volume, on the run's ruling. A stated reading, not a date the book prints.
- Classification
- Filed as a manual with a maintenance log attached. The printed method is the published version; the pencil in the margin is what somebody found when they actually ran it.
- Mechanism
- Correction by a previous user: quantities changed, an order of operations rewritten, a step crossed out with a better one beside it.
- Cross-reference
- The register's recipe finding, restated. A working copy beats a clean one, which is true of every cookbook this paper has ever tested to destruction.
This paper publishes recipes and receives corrections, so the sixth volume is the one the kitchen desk asked to keep. A pupil is issued a second-hand textbook and finds that a previous owner has been through it: quantities altered, an instruction reversed, a step struck out and replaced in the margin. The annotated copy outperforms the printed one immediately, which is what an annotated copy does. The register's interest is the provenance question that follows and which the volume takes seriously: a method that works is not the same as a method you should use, and knowing who wrote in the margin turns out to matter a great deal.
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WT-2009-HP6 / Adaptation, sixth school year
Plate LXXI
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (film)
2009
David Yates, from the 2005 novel
film
Plate held; adaptation A Large Household in Visible Decline
Period school year 1996–97 · Scotland Dated to the volume it adapts, on the run's one-school-year ruling. A stated reading.
- Jurisdiction
- Residential, and deteriorating. Attendance falls, the staff thin out, security is imposed from outside, and the building is visibly less looked after than it was.
- Classification
- Filed by this register as a decline document: the same premises as the first adaptation, eight years on, with the upkeep withdrawn.
- Inventory
- The annotated textbook survives the adaptation, which is the one thing the desk asked of it, and is hidden rather than destroyed.
This paper writes about maintenance, so the sixth adaptation is the one it finds saddest for reasons that have nothing to do with the plot. The building is the same building and it is not being kept. The light is lower, the corridors are emptier, the staff are stretched, and there is now a security presence on the grounds that nobody in the household controls. A large residential institution declines exactly like this, gradually and in the fabric, before anything dramatic happens to it. The register notes it and files the annotated textbook, which is the volume's real document and survives intact.
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WT-2007-HDH / School year, seventh
Plate LXVIII
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
2007
J. K. Rowling
novel
Plate held; provisioning filing The Volume That Leaves the School, and It Is About Rations
Period school year 1997–98 · a tent, and then the school One school year per volume, on the run's ruling. A stated reading, not a date the book prints.
- Inventory
- One bag of unlimited capacity and almost nothing worth carrying in it. The volume counts the food, and the count goes down.
- Perimeter
- Recast from scratch every night around a tent, by three people taking turns on watch.
- Cross-reference
- The run's provisioning thesis, reached from the school sequence: the siege is lost to hunger, boredom and an argument, and one member walks out.
The volume everybody remembers as the war is, for two-thirds of its length, a camping document, and the desk regards it as the strongest single filing in the sequence. Three people live in a tent, move it, re-establish the perimeter every night, ration badly, become cold and hungry, and fall out. One of them leaves. Nothing supernatural causes that: they run out of food and ideas at the same time. The zombie register spent fifty-three cards establishing that a siege is lost from the inside rather than at the boards, and a children's book had already filed the same result, with a rota and a mushroom.
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WT-2010-HP7 / Adaptation, seventh school year, first part
Plate LXXII
Deathly Hallows – Part 1
2010
David Yates, from the 2007 novel
film
Plate held; adaptation The Longest Camping Filing on the Register
Period school year 1997–98 · a tent Dated to the volume it adapts, on the run's one-school-year ruling. The book is filed across two plates because the adaptation is two films, and both carry the same period.
- Inventory
- Shown rather than summarised: what is in the bag, what there is to eat, and how little of it. The register has waited the whole run for a film that counts.
- Perimeter
- Re-established every night, on camera, by hand, by whoever is on watch.
- Cross-reference
- The siege is lost to hunger and an argument, with the perimeter intact, which is the outbreak register's finding arrived at from a different direction entirely.
The adaptation splits the volume and gives the camping most of a film to itself, and the register is grateful. What that length buys is the boredom. Three people in a tent, moving it, casting the perimeter again each night, eating badly, saying less to each other every week, until one of them puts down the watch and walks out. The boards held. The perimeter was never breached. The household failed anyway, over food, cold and the length of the occupation, which is the run's standing result and here it is in a children's franchise.
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WT-2011-HP8 / Adaptation, seventh school year, second part
Plate LXXIII
Deathly Hallows – Part 2
2011
David Yates, from the 2007 novel
film
Plate held; adaptation The Building Is Fortified, and the Failure Is Internal
Period school year 1997–98 · the school Dated to the volume it adapts, on the run's one-school-year ruling. Shares its period with the first part, which the register carries rather than adjusting.
- Perimeter
- Formally erected: the staff stand round the building and raise a boundary over it, as a stated procedure.
- Jurisdiction
- Residential, under siege. The occupants are evacuated by year group and the ones who stay are the household defending its own premises.
- Cross-reference
- The boundary is defeated from inside, by an occupant who lets the attacker through, which is where the outbreak register said it would be defeated.
The register closes the school sequence on a formally raised perimeter, and on its failure. The staff assemble, raise a formal boundary over the building, and evacuate by age, and for a while it holds against everything outside it. Then somebody inside opens it. Every register the desk has compiled this autumn reached the same result from different directions: the boards hold, the household does not, and the decision that loses the building is nearly always made at the door by whoever is standing on the correct side of it. Fifteen plates of a boarding school, and the finding is the run's.
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WT-1998-PRM / Adaptation, filed by the rule
Plate LIV
Practical Magic
1998
Griffin Dunne, from the 1995 novel
film
Plate held; adaptation The 1995 Novel, Filmed, and Filed by the Rule
Period the 1990s · contemporary
- Jurisdiction
- Carried from the novel's card. The desk does not restate that card here as though it had checked the film.
- Mechanism
- Filed by the rule. An adaptation is a filing.
- Perimeter
- Not described beyond the novel it adapts.
The register files the adaptation on its own plate by the rule. The aunts' house and the garden are on the 1995 card, which is where the desk's file on them is.
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WT-2001-RBR / Shared lease, under-fives
Plate LIX
Room on the Broom
2001
Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler
story
Plate held; shared occupancy The Household Grows by One Lodger Per Page
Period undated · placed at publication The book fixes no year. Placed at publication on the register's standing rule.
- Inventory
- One broom and one cat to begin with, and a household that grows by one lodger per page.
- Jurisdiction
- Shared occupancy, expanding by one lodger per page.
- Cross-reference
- The mixed-households section of this register, argued in a picture book and understood by three-year-olds without difficulty.
The register does not file a picture book to be charming. It files this one because it is the mixed-household thesis in its purest available form: a sole occupant, and a household that grows by one lodger per page. The desk has read four-hundred-page novels that reach the same arrangement with considerably less clarity, and it notes that the intended reader here is three and has no difficulty with any of it.
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WT-2003-WFM / Dairy jurisdiction
Plate LXII
The Wee Free Men
2003
Terry Pratchett
novel
Plate held; dairy filing The Witch Who Can Actually Make the Cheese
Period the Chalk · undated, placed at publication The secondary world fixes no year. Placed at publication on the register's standing rule.
- Jurisdiction
- Agricultural. A dairy farm, and a witch on it.
- Mechanism
- Cheese, and paying attention. The register's leading finding runs on dairy and so does this filing.
- Cross-reference
- The register's butter finding, arrived at from the other direction: here the witch is the one in the dairy.
Centuries of documents record accusations that begin with milk going wrong, and here is a children's novel whose witch works a dairy farm and makes cheese. The desk files it with the assize rolls and the scholarship rather than with the comedies, on the dairy.
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WT-2008-BHM / Carried filing, shared tenancy
Plate LXX
Being Human
2008
Toby Whithouse, for BBC Three
television series
Plate held; filed elsewhere A Vampire, a Werewolf and a Ghost Share a Flat in Bristol
Period contemporary · Bristol
Filed at UR-2008-BHM, in the Undead Register.
- Jurisdiction
- Shared tenancy. A vampire, a werewolf and a ghost sharing a flat in Bristol.
- Classification
- Carried, not re-argued. The filing belongs to the Undead Register and this card is a pointer to it, so that the mixed households read as one section.
- Cross-reference
- What the arrangement is like is on the undead register's own card. This card points at it.
The desk will not file a work twice, so it carries this one and points at the register that holds it. It belongs in this section on its premise: a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost sharing a flat in Bristol. What the arrangement is like is on the undead register's own card, and the desk does not re-argue it here.
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WT-2012-HTL / Carried filing, hospitality
Plate LXXIV
Hotel Transylvania
2012
Genndy Tartakovsky
animated film
Plate held; filed elsewhere The Section Needs a Hotel, and the Archive Has One
Period contemporary · a hotel
Filed at UR-2012-HTL, in the Undead Register.
- Jurisdiction
- Hospitality. A hotel, carried.
- Classification
- Carried, not re-argued. The register that opened the hotel keeps it; this card is the pointer, and the sequels stay with the parent filing.
- Cross-reference
- A hotel rather than a household, which is what makes it hospitality rather than tenancy.
The mixed-households section needs a hotel and the archive already has one, so the desk carries it rather than opening a second filing. What earns it a place here is the arrangement rather than the guest list: several species in one building. The sequels are the parent register's to file or decline, and this desk does not open a filing on another register's franchise. That rule cost this page three cards and the desk considers it well spent.
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WT-2014-WWD / Carried filing, chore rota
Plate LXXVI
What We Do in the Shadows
2014
Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi
film
Plate held; filed elsewhere The Chore Rota Is the Standing Item
Period contemporary
Filed at UR-2014-DOC, in the Undead Register.
- Jurisdiction
- Shared tenancy, and a chore rota.
- Classification
- Carried, not re-argued. The filing lives in the Undead Register and this card points at it, because a work gets one filing across the whole archive.
- Cross-reference
- The chore rota, which is this section's central document and the reason the mixed households are filed together at all.
The desk carries this card because the mixed-households section is, in the end, about the chores. What the filing supplies is the section's working definition: a mixed household is not a household of monsters, it is a household in which the monstrousness has become the least interesting thing about the arrangement, and the standing item is the rota. The register has spent five centuries reading documents which insist that such a household would be a conspiracy. This is what the consented footage actually shows, and it is a rota.
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WT-2016-BLW / Sequel filing, thin
Plate LXXVIII
Blair Witch
2016
Adam Wingard
film
Plate held; sequel filing A Second Filing on a Subject Who Was Not in the First
Period 2014
- Confidence
- Not assessed. The register's absent finding rests on the 1999 filing alone, and this card is deliberately not cited in support of it.
- Jurisdiction
- Carried forward from the 1999 filing. Filed on its own plate because the register keeps sequels whether or not they add anything.
- Cross-reference
- The 1999 card, which carries the finding. This one carries the plate and the position on the clock.
The register keeps sequels, so here is one, and the honest thing to say about it is that the desk has nothing to add. There was a temptation here and the desk records that it resisted it: a second filing on a subject who was never in evidence in the first is an inviting shape for an argument, and the argument would have been the desk's invention rather than the film's. So the card carries the plate, the year and the position on the clock, and the absent finding cites the 1999 filing and stops. A register that manufactures its own corroboration is doing what its founding documents did.
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WT-2016-LOV / Fully provisioned kitchen
Plate LXXX
The Love Witch
2016
Anna Biller
film
Plate held; adult filing The Best-Stocked Kitchen on the Register
Period contemporary · Arcata, California
- Inventory
- The most fully provisioned kitchen on the register.
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic. The kitchen is the filing.
- Mechanism
- The kitchen. The register cites this card under its recipe finding.
This paper runs a kitchen column, and this is the most fully provisioned kitchen on the register. The desk's interest stops at the kitchen and it says so. Adult.
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WT-2016-JAN / Examination, retrospective
Plate LXXIX
The Autopsy of Jane Doe
2016
André Øvredal
film
Plate held; adult filing The Body Is One of the Salem Accused, and the Examination Is the Plot
Period 2016 · Virginia
- Mechanism
- Discovered by examination rather than asserted. Every finding in the film is produced by a step of the procedure.
- Jurisdiction
- Coroner's. The whole filing is one examination, conducted in order, with a record kept.
- Cross-reference
- The body on the table is one of the Salem accused, which puts this card in direct conversation with the court papers at the front of the page.
The register keeps almost no filings that proceed by evidence, and this is the best of them. An examination is conducted in order, and each stage produces a finding that unsettles the last, which is what an honest examination looks like when the subject is not what the paperwork said. What it eventually establishes is that the body belongs to one of the Salem accused. Filed here rather than with the hauntings because the verdict is about a trial. Adult, and unpleasant in a clinical way.
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WT-2018-CAS / Same name, different filing
Plate LXXXI
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina
2018
Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
television series
Plate held; age flag on file The Same Name, and Emphatically Not the Same Programme
Period contemporary · undated
- Classification
- The register's clearest naming hazard. It shares a name with a programme made for children and is not one.
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic, nominally. The register files it for the naming hazard rather than for the household.
- Mechanism
- Not summarised here. The card exists to mark an age line, and the desk does not need the plot to draw one.
Filed with a flag on the front, because the register exists partly so that a parent can check. This is teen and up. It shares a name with a programme made for children, and it is not that programme, and the register would rather say so plainly on a card than have somebody find out at eight o'clock on a Saturday. The two sit twenty-two years apart on the clock where a reader will meet them separately.
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WT-2019-MID / Membership, offered
Plate LXXXIII
Midsommar
2019
Ari Aster
film
Plate held; ritual household The Invitation Includes a Replacement Family
Period undated · the fictional Hårga commune, Hälsingland The story supplies no calendar year. The desk uses the film's release year as a sorting anchor; the community and its rites are the film's fiction.
- Jurisdiction
- A ritual household. The register files the commune's membership and authority without asserting that its inhabitants are witches.
- Invitation
- Pelle invites Christian and his friends to a nine-day midsummer festival at his ancestral commune in rural Sweden.
- Membership
- Pelle tells Dani that after his parents died, the commune became his new family.
Dani joins the visit while grieving the loss of her family. When the ceremonies disturb her, Pelle persuades her to stay and offers his own account of finding a family there. Later she is crowned May Queen after a dancing competition. The register follows how belonging becomes an assigned role with authority attached. The household offers a family feeling before the visitor has seen the job description.
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WT-2019-WWD / Carried filing, series
Plate LXXXIV
What We Do in the Shadows
2019
Jemaine Clement, for FX
television series
Plate held; filed elsewhere The 2014 Filing, Carried On as a Series
Period contemporary · Staten Island
Filed at UR-2019-WWD, in the Undead Register.
- Jurisdiction
- Shared tenancy, on Staten Island.
- Classification
- Carried, not re-argued. One work, one filing, across the whole archive; this card is the pointer to the filing that holds it.
- Cross-reference
- The 2014 filing, as a series.
The register closes its mixed households with a series: 2019 to 2024, on Staten Island. What the arrangement is like over that window is on the undead register's card, and the desk does not re-argue it here. The prosecution documents at the front of this page were produced by people convinced that a witch's household was an organised conspiracy. The section this card closes is what the desk found instead, which is households, with rotas.
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WT-2020-OWL / Household with a lodger, animated
Plate LXXXVI
The Owl House
2020
Dana Terrace
animated series
Plate held; mixed occupancy A Witch's House, With a Demon Lodger In It
Period contemporary · undated The setting fixes no year and no place the register will name; placed at broadcast on its standing rule.
- Jurisdiction
- Shared occupancy. A witch's house, and a demon lodger in it, which is the whole of the arrangement the register files.
- Mechanism
- Beside the point. The register files the tenancy and leaves the magic to the programme.
- Cross-reference
- A mixed household in everything but the section it is filed in, and the register would move it down the page if the arrangement were the plot rather than the setting.
A witch's house with a demon lodger in it is a mixed household by any definition this register uses, and the only reason the card is filed up here rather than down in that section is that the arrangement is the setting rather than the story. The desk notes it anyway, because a reader looking for the same arrangement at eight years old should be able to find one. Suitable from about eight, and better than the register expected.
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WT-2021-WAN / Suburban household, rebuilt by decade
Plate LXXXVII
WandaVision
2021
Jac Schaeffer
television series
Plate held; broadcast filing The 1964 Filing, Rebuilt Decade by Decade
Period contemporary · a suburb
- Jurisdiction
- Suburban. The sitcom house of 1964, rebuilt from the inside and one decade at a time.
- Mechanism
- Set dressing, used as argument. The house is rebuilt decade by decade.
- Cross-reference
- The 1964 filing is named in the text rather than merely echoed, which the register records as an unusually honest citation.
Fifty-seven years after the suburbs reached television, a series takes the sitcom household apart to see what it is made of. The same house is rebuilt decade by decade, and this paper would have filed the card for the fittings alone. The homage to the 1964 filing is stated in the text rather than left to be spotted, which the register records as an unusually honest citation.
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WT-2022-HC2 / Sequel filing, thin
Plate LXXXVIII
Hocus Pocus 2
2022
Anne Fletcher
film
Plate held; sequel filing A Sequel, Twenty-Nine Years On, Filed Without Comment
Period contemporary · Salem
- Jurisdiction
- Carried from the 1993 filing, whose premises the plan describes as a preserved house kept as a museum. The desk does not extend that description to this card on its own authority.
- Mechanism
- Not described. The register's file on this filing is thin and the card says so rather than filling the space.
- Cross-reference
- Filed apart from the 1993 film. Sequels are filings; the desk keeps them whether or not they add anything.
The register keeps its sequels, and it keeps this one, and that is very nearly all it has to say. Twenty-nine years separate this plate from the 1993 filing, which is the fact the clock is here to record. The desk said it would be dry about the Salem tourist economy exactly once and it was, on that earlier card, and it is not going to say it a second time on the strength of a sequel it cannot describe. A thin file printed as a thin file is worth more to a reader than a full-looking one, and this register would rather be short than confident.
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WT-2024-AGA / Broadcast filing, thin
Plate XC
Agatha All Along
2024
Jac Schaeffer
television series
Plate held; broadcast filing The Last Television Card, and the Desk Has Not Read the File
Period contemporary · undated
- Jurisdiction
- Not established. The register carries the filing, its year and its position, and does not claim an account of the household in it.
- Mechanism
- Not described, and the card would rather say so than guess. A filing with nothing under it is still a filing.
- Cross-reference
- The 2021 filing, which shares this one's creator. What else the two have in common is not something the desk has established.
The newest television filing on the register, and the desk's file on it is a title, a year and a maker. There is a version of this card that argues something, and the desk wrote it and took it out, because everything in it came from the desk rather than from the record. A register whose whole argument is that confident detail about a subject is usually somebody's invention cannot then invent confidently on its own last television plate. So: it exists, and it sits at the end of the broadcast run. The rest is somebody else's to establish.
No filings match. The register is complete; your criteria are not.
The rulings
I have graded the folklore against the register above, and it makes the worst showing of any register in this run. The rulings are filed at The Coven Rulings.
What to read
Eight filings carry the rest of the register, and there is a shelf that would let a reader check the desk and in places correct it. On this register the shelf does more of the work than the canon, for the reason set out above. Both are at Selected Witch Readings.
Counsel asks me to state plainly: the works above belong to their respective authors, studios and estates; the file references, jurisdictions and dispositions are the desk’s own apparatus and have no legal standing whatsoever; and nothing on this page should be read as a view about any living person, any family, or any town’s present-day arrangements for commemorating what was done in it. That last clause is counsel’s and I have signed it without amendment, which for me is a considerable retreat.
That is the run. Nine registers, nine Wednesdays, and a season handed to me on the reasoning that I was already awake. The whole thing leaves the listings on the Wednesday after Halloween — the first seasonal window this desk has built that closes without anybody being sent out to close it, which those of us on the graveyard shift are entitled to call progress. After that there is November to account for, a kitchen column with firm views about brining, and a table to lay. I am told I am not needed for the table. I have filed an objection. It is not expected to succeed.
— Casimir Vane
