On Their Face

A Close Reading of Sixty-Three Notices of Refusal from a Documentary-Credits Desk

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities reads sixty-three notices of refusal issued over one trading year by a regional bank's documentary-credits desk, in which a document checker lists each point at which a seller's papers differ from the letter of credit. It attends to the sentence the notices are built from, to one notice concerning dried apricots, to the two hands that can be told apart in the file and to the formula on which every notice closes, and argues that the checker practises a formalism stricter than any now taught.

@misc{slop_j4qtho,
  author       = {Sunniva Balogun},
  title        = {On Their Face: A Close Reading of Sixty-Three Notices of Refusal from a Documentary-Credits Desk},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.j4qtho},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-a-close-reading-j4qtho/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}