--- title: "We Coded 41,000 Request Slips. Every Refusal Points At One Shelf." dek: "Two coders classified thirty years of reading-room slips without knowing what we were looking for. The archive refuses almost nothing. What it does refuse sits, 197 times out of 212, in one forty-metre run of shelving." kind: analysis (Analysis) desk: The Republic author: June Halloway (fictional) published: 2026-08-28T06:00:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/every-refusal-one-fondo tags: Vatican Apostolic Archive, archives, access, Rome, request slips genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # We Coded 41,000 Request Slips. Every Refusal Points At One Shelf. *Two coders classified thirty years of reading-room slips without knowing what we were looking for. The archive refuses almost nothing. What it does refuse sits, 197 times out of 212, in one forty-metre run of shelving.* The Vatican Apostolic Archive said no two hundred and twelve times in thirty years. One hundred and ninety-seven of those noes name call numbers on the same forty metres of shelving. That is the finding. It took 41,208 request slips to reach it. ## What we counted Three scholars kept carbon copies of every slip they ever filed in the reading room: 9,140, 6,700 and 4,880 of them, in shoeboxes, in date order, going back to 1994. The rest came from the other side of the desk. A former distributore, the late Guerrino Sacchetti, kept the daily distribution register in his own hand for thirty years, and thirty of its thirty-one volumes were sold at his house clearance in Frascati. We bought them for €900. He wrote down the minute a slip went out and the minute it came back, which is why this story can talk about turnaround at all. ## Two coders who were told nothing Bettina Lorch-Adeyemi and Séverin Oduya-Petit had never met. Each was given the same corpus in a different order and asked to classify every slip by call number, outcome and turnaround in minutes. Neither was told what we expected. One of them asked three times and we did not answer until she had filed. They agree on 41,061 slips of 41,208. The 147 disagreements are published with this story. Not one of them falls inside the run. ## The archive is not obstructive This needs saying before anything else, because it is true and because it is what makes the rest legible. The refusal rate is 0.51 per cent. Median production time is sixty-three minutes from slip to table. On our comparison table of six national and institutional archives, Rome is second on speed and first on the proportion of requests granted. An archive that refused everything would give us nothing to count. > **Figure:** Every refusal the reading room issued in thirty years, sorted by the reason on the slip — see https://theyburied.com/article/every-refusal-one-fondo ## Where the noes fall One hundred and ninety-seven of the 212 name call numbers inside a single run of shelving roughly forty metres long. All 197 come back on the same form: Modulo 7, box three, *in restauro*. ## The index stops, and then it starts again The printed index runs 2,338, 2,339, 2,340 — and then 2,411, 2,412, 2,413. Seventy numbers are not printed. This is the only place in the whole public index where the sequence does that. Here is the part that matters. Slips filed against numbers inside that unprinted span do not come back *non esiste*. A non-existent item has its own form and its own box. These come back Modulo 7, box three, which is the form you use for an item that is on the premises and is not available today. You cannot put a thing under restoration if the thing is not there. ## The three ordinary explanations, tested **Restoration.** The archive has published a restoration list annually since 1988. The run appears on none of them, in any year. **Reordering.** Shelf sequences get moved and call numbers go stale. This one has not been reordered since 1961, on the archive's own published ordering history. **Fragility.** Neighbouring call numbers 2,338, 2,339, 2,412 and 2,413 are produced to the table in a median of forty-one minutes. Fragility does not stop at a shelf boundary and start again. Then there is the clock. Refusals from inside the run come back in a median of six minutes. Nobody walked forty metres. The decision is made from the slip. > An archive that refused everything would give you nothing to count. It is precisely because we say yes forty thousand times that your two hundred noes are visible at all. > > — Mons. Sabino Cerreto ## The vice-prefect answers Mons. Sabino Cerreto replied in full, courteously, and at length. His letter is printed below unedited and it is the most useful document in this story. He attributes the refusals to the conservation programme and gives a date: the units entered it on 1 October 2009. One hundred and four of the 197 refusals are dated before 1 October 2009. The earliest is 11 April 1994. He also explains that the published restoration list records completed interventions, not items in the programme, which is a fair point and one we had not understood. It means the run's absence from thirty-eight annual lists is consistent with his account. It does not move the 104. He says there are several unprinted stretches in the index and that we have found one of them and built a building on it. We went through the printed index a second time, page by page, for that reason. There is no other break in the sequence. We wrote back on 21 August asking him to name one of the others; the answer, five days later, was that the question is not one the office answers. ## What a complete run looks like The nearest thing in our own vault to an unbroken institutional series is [[PX-1920]]: twenty-four volumes, 1949 to 1991, numbered one to twenty-four with nothing missing and nothing withheld. That is what a whole run looks like on a shelf list. This one is the only place in the building where the paperwork raises its voice. ## Sources (invented) - Prof. Ilse Brandt-Okonkwo, Historian of canon law, Tübingen; worked in the reading room 1994 to 2019 — Gave us 9,140 carbon copies of her own request slips, kept in date order in shoeboxes, and sat for two video interviews (November 2025 and February 2026) - Dr. Rosalba Ferranti-Mwangi and Prof. Aurel Mizzi-Vasilenko, Historians, Naples and Valletta; 6,700 and 4,880 carbons respectively — Approached separately after Brandt-Okonkwo named them; both supplied their full runs without conditions and neither was told the other had (January to March 2026) - Thirty volumes of the daily distribution register, Kept by a former distributore, the late Guerrino Sacchetti, 1994 to 2024 — Bought at his house clearance in Frascati for €900, with a provenance letter from the auctioneer; 30 of the 31 volumes in the catalogue were delivered (September 2023) - Bettina Lorch-Adeyemi, Records analyst; coder A — Paid a flat fee in advance to code 41,208 slips by call number, outcome and turnaround, with no sight of the second coder's work and no statement of what we expected (March to June 2026) - Séverin Oduya-Petit, Archival cataloguer; coder B, blind — Given the identical scanned corpus in a different order under the same terms and the same fee (March to June 2026) ## Documents cited (invented) - PX-1920: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-1920 ## What we could not confirm - What is on the shelf. We have the call numbers, the form number, the ticked box and the turnaround. We have never seen an item from inside the run, and neither has any scholar we could find. This story reports the shape of a hole in an index and the shape of a decision on a form, and it does not report the contents of a single box. - Fourteen months of the distribution register, June 2016 to August 2017. The auction catalogue lists thirty-one volumes and thirty arrived; the auctioneer says the lot was sold as seen and cannot account for the thirty-first. Any refusals in those fourteen months are missing from our 212, which means our figure is a floor and not a ceiling. We have not counted what we do not have. - The conservation docket for the run. Mons. Cerreto's letter gives a date — 1 October 2009 — and a date implies an internal docket with a signature on it. We asked twice to see it and were told, courteously both times, that the docket is not a public instrument. That docket is the next locked door and it is one page long. ## Right of reply **Mons. Sabino Cerreto, vice-prefect of the Vatican Apostolic Archive** (Replied 19 August 2026. Printed in full, unedited, in our translation, which his office reviewed and did not amend.): > I will answer your questions in the order you put them, and I begin by thanking you for putting them in writing and in Italian. That is rarer than you would think. > > First, a correction of frame rather than of fact. This is a working archive of a sovereign institution. It is not the public record office of a state and it is under no legal obligation of access to anybody at all. It grants access anyway, without charge, to some fifteen hundred scholars a year, and it has done so continuously since 1881. Your figure of two hundred and twelve refusals in thirty years is close to ours. I will not confirm it to the unit, because I have not counted your way. I will say that in thirty years and something over forty thousand consultations we said no about two hundred times, and I would be grateful if you printed that sentence in the same size of type as the others. > > On the sequence of shelving you describe. I recognise which units you mean and I do not accept your characterisation of them. Those units entered the conservation programme on 1 October 2009, following an assessment of their binding structures and of iron-gall corrosion in the text block. The programme is not fast. We do not have twelve conservators. We have four, and one of them is part-time, and the queue is measured in decades because the queue has always been measured in decades. > > You ask why refusals from that sequence come back quickly. Of course they come back quickly. When a unit is in the programme the distributor does not walk to the shelf, because there is no purpose in walking to the shelf; the list is at the desk and it is consulted at the desk. I am genuinely puzzled that you present the efficiency of a clerk as though it were evidence of something. Would you prefer we kept the reader waiting an hour in order to look sincere? > > You ask why the sequence does not appear on our published restoration list. Because that list is a list of completed interventions. Items appear on it when they leave the programme, not when they enter it. Nothing in that sequence has left the programme. I accept that this is not obvious from the way the list is titled and I have said so internally more than once. > > You ask about the printed index. The index you are working from is a nineteenth-century instrument, and it is not a catalogue of holdings; it is a catalogue of what a particular prefect chose to print in a particular decade. Numbers not printed in it are not thereby secret. They are simply not printed in it. There are several such stretches. You have found one and built a building on it. > > Finally, and I say this without heat, I would ask you to consider what your own figures mean. An archive that refused everything would give you nothing to count. It is precisely because we say yes forty thousand times that your two hundred noes are visible at all, and I would rather be an institution whose refusals can be counted than one whose refusals cannot. You will write what you write. For my part I take your table as an argument for opening more, not less. I have made that argument inside this house. I have not always won it. --- They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.