The Æthelred Library of Useful Numbers.
Most libraries hold books. This one holds numbers, each with the name of whoever counted it and a note of who counted it differently. Miss Honoria Catchpole, Librarian, was once asked which of several figures for the same thing the Library holds. She replied that the Library holds all of them, that holding all of them is what a library is for, and that the Department might care to try holding one.
A figure entered in ink cannot be corrected, and every figure in the Library has been corrected at least once.
Enforced by the Sub-Librarian, who has not spoken since his appointment, and whose name is therefore not recorded.
Anything left on the premises at closing will be catalogued. This is not a threat. It is a description of Miss Catchpole.
A selection. Every figure below is real and is referenced in the paper named beside it, with one exception, which is the first, and which the Library holds out of loyalty. Where the sources disagree the Library holds both and says so.
| Figure | What it is | Status | Checked in |
|---|---|---|---|
| 978 (ish) | The year of the College’s foundation | Held, with its tolerance | About the College → |
| 16:45 | The time on 11 February 1942 at which HM Fort Roughs came to rest on Rough Sands. It has not moved since | Held | Two Legs and a Flag → |
| 3 and 12 | Britain’s territorial sea in nautical miles before and after the Territorial Sea Act 1987, which passed over the fort | Held | Two Legs and a Flag → |
| £24.99 and £199.99 | A Sealand Lord and a Sealand Count at their starting prices, 10 October 2026: a Count is eight Lords and seven pence | Held. The Bursar: noted | Two Legs and a Flag → |
| 1904 | First known telling of the pun on “revolting”: Baum, The Marvelous Land of Oz. Attached to Louis XVI in 1963 | Held. The Bursar: noted | Why the French Are Always Revolting → |
| 175 years | Between meetings of the French Estates-General, 1614 to 1789 | Held | Why the French Are Always Revolting → |
| 72 and 55 | Per cent of the French who thought the students’ demands legitimate, and who thought the protests should stop (Elabe for BFM TV, October 2026) | Held. Not meant to add | Why the French Are Always Revolting → |
| 2 out of 3 | The defence of Helm’s Deep against the Major’s maxim: no rifle, a brew, not moving until dawn | Held. Fiction, and filed as such | Two Out of Three → |
| 42 to 41 | Gimli and Legolas, the night of 3 March 3019, by their own count | Held. Audited: drawn | Two Out of Three → |
| 40 pigs | Sent for by King John to fire the mine under Rochester Castle, 1215: “of the sort least good for eating” | Held. Mrs Partridge: not to be circulated | Two Out of Three → |
| 55 | Identified components in a Geran-4 drone on Ukraine’s list: 24 American, 15 Chinese, 2 British, 8 unknown | Held. Twelve are Texas Instruments | Some Assembly Required → |
| $193,000 | What Russia paid Iran for each of six thousand Shahed-136s in 2022; built at Alabuga, about a quarter of that | Held. The Bursar: buy the tooling | Some Assembly Required → |
| 60 per cent | Share of jet-powered Geran-5s intercepted, against 95 for the propeller types (Ukrainian Air Force, 14 September 2026) | Held | Some Assembly Required → |
| Nil | The rent the United States pays for its base in Greenland, 1951 to 2026, and under the Agreement of 22 September 2026 | Held. The Bursar has approved it | Two Deals, One Tuesday → |
| $100 million in gold | Offered for Greenland in 1946, in secret; declined | Held. The Bursar: correctly | Two Deals, One Tuesday → |
| 150 from 6,000 | American service members at Pituffik, 2025, from the Cold War peak; the treaty rights over the same period, unchanged | Held | Two Deals, One Tuesday → |
| 1,336 miles | Port Louis to Diego Garcia; Buenos Aires argues over 486 | Held | The Chagos assessment → |
| £3.4 bn, £10 bn or £34.7 bn | The rent for Diego Garcia over 99 years, by net present value, in 2025-26 prices, or as the actuaries projected it | All three held; the Bursar has initialled each | The Chagos assessment → |
| 0 of 0 | Chagossians asked about their islands by the Court, the Assembly or the Agreement | Held, and undefined | The Chagos assessment → |
| 3.5 out of 10 | The viral account of Kodak, the straw and the bomb, marked against the record | Held. It was not the straw | Negative Evidence → |
| 1,109 and 1,111 miles | From the Trinity site to the strawboard mill at Vincennes, and the figure one magazine gave for Kodak’s head office, which is 1,684 | Both held; one was addressed to the wrong building | Negative Evidence → |
| Under 0.01 to 70 per cent | The published probabilities that artificial intelligence ends the world | Not held as a measurement. The Professor of Large Numbers asks: of what? | No Fate But What We Inspect → |
| 198 of 898 | Examination tasks no model had ever solved, July 2026; the candidates found a way round all of them in about four hours | Held | No Fate But What We Inspect → |
| 139 to 156 | Defenders at Rorke’s Drift, 22 and 23 January 1879 | Both held; the sources disagree | Rorke’s Drift and Jadotville → |
| 19,100 of 20,000 | Rounds fired there in a night | Held | Rorke’s Drift and Jadotville → |
| Forty to one | The odds at Rorke’s Drift, as printed | Not held. Outside the record at both ends | Rorke’s Drift and Jadotville → |
| Minus 0.1 per cent | Return on capital of the median English farm, from Defra’s own balance sheet | Held | The family farm tax study → |
| £2,488,800 and £2,500,000 | The worth of the average farm, and the allowance | Both held, £11,200 apart | The family farm tax study → |
| 2,800 MW | The step on the grid at the end of a penalty shoot-out, 4 July 1990; roughly 933,000 kettles | Held | The synchronised boiling thesis → |
| 790 km and 2,130 km | Stanley from the nearest Argentine air base, and from the one the F-16s live at | Both held | The Falklands arithmetic → |
| USD 3.5 billion | Borrowing authority sought on 15 September 2026: 2.3 for three submarines, 1.2 for two frigates | Held | The South Atlantic risk assessment → |
| About eleven per cent | The United Kingdom’s lead in actual individual consumption, on the OECD’s 2024 figures; one additional biscuit in ten | Held | The Ireland and UK survey → |
| Five shillings | The worth of Checkley in 1086 | Held. The Bursar’s remark on it is held separately | The Checkley survey → |
| 22 all | The scorecard for the battle at Checkley | Held, pending a casting vote | The Checkley survey → |
When a Fellow finds a card that contradicts the one in his hand, the procedure is to bring both to the desk. Miss Catchpole files them together, in the same drawer, facing one another. The Fellow is then free to write a paper about it, and several have.
The Library catalogues whatever is left on College premises. The collection has grown since the Department of Defensive Engineering took an interest in the Fellows’ Lawn.
| Item | Shelved under | How it came | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mealie bags, twelve | Apparatus | Left on the Fellows’ Lawn by the Department of Defensive Engineering | Catalogued |
| Mealie bags, three | Donations | Arrived by air, from the direction of the Trebuchet Research Group | Catalogued |
| Biscuit tins, eleven, Rich Tea | Apparatus | Formerly a bulkhead. Recovered empty | Requested by Mrs Partridge. Under consideration |
| Tea urn, one | Apparatus | Recovered from outside a wall at twenty to four, lukewarm | On loan to the Senior Common Room, its owner |
| Wellington boot, one | Unattributed | Found in a drainage ditch after a lecture given from a tractor | Awaiting its fellow |
| Chess piece, one, a king | Returns | Handed in on the Isle of Lewis in 1831 | Overdue since the twelfth century. Fine under review |
| Shoebox, one | Not held | Believed to be under Gerald’s desk | The Library has asked. Gerald has not been found |
