How a page gets marked in the reading room
People write to ask what a desk session looks like before they reserve the chair. The answer is a sequence, and we keep it the same so a return visit can be shorter. The room is on Gyeondalsan-ro in Munbong-dong. The desk faces the window. The worksheet has three labels already printed: signature, priority, held balance.
Before any numbers
You sit. Coats go on the hook, phones stay silent, and seed phrases stay where you left them. If you brought a printout, you set it on the blotter. If you did not, I open drawer A or drawer B and choose a sample. Drawer A is a single signature and a base fee. Drawer B adds a priority fee. We say which drawer we opened so you know you are looking at a library sample and not at another visitor’s paper.
I read the amount of SOL that moved, once, and then I set it aside. The transferred amount is not the fee. Writing it in the margin in parentheses stops it from wandering into the arithmetic later.
The order of the columns
Signature first. Count them. Write 5,000 lamports for each. Priority second, and only if the receipt shows a compute-unit price or an extra fee beyond the base. Held balance third, when the page or the note from drawer C gives us a figure that the account keeps. Empty columns stay empty. An empty priority column means the sender did not attach a priority fee. It does not mean we forgot.
We use a pencil. Visitors change a digit when they recount the signatures, and ink makes them ashamed of the correction. The lamport card under the blotter is there when someone wants to see 5,000 lamports as a fraction of one SOL. We turn the card over when it becomes a distraction.
What the sitting refuses to absorb
One receipt. Seventy-five minutes. No second transaction slipped in at the end. No advice about whether to move SOL tomorrow. If the columns are finished early, we spend the remaining time on questions about the columns, not on a new page. That limit is why the return reading exists: a later receipt gets its own appointment, at forty minutes, because the method is no longer new.
You take the worksheet. I do not keep a copy. The sample, if we used one, goes back in its drawer. The chair is free for the next reader at the top of the next hour.