Archive of Retired Inks

The Archive of Retired Inks is the Tower's custodial holding for inks, pigments, and inscription media that have been withdrawn from active circulation but not formally declared obsolete. It is administered jointly by the Office of Proprietary Inks and the Archive of Retired Methods, and is housed on Sub-Basement 7, Corridor Delta, in a range of cabinets immediately adjacent to the Sub-Basement of Retired Ambiguities and separated from the latter by a glazed partition of disputed height. The distinction the Archive exists to preserve is narrow but load-bearing: a retired ink is one whose use has been suspended pending review, whereas a retired method is a process concluded. An ink may therefore remain in the Archive for centuries without becoming a method, and several have.

Scope and jurisdiction

The Archive holds some four thousand formulations, of which roughly six hundred remain legible. Admission is by petition to the Keeper of Provisional Inks, who must certify that the ink in question is neither currently archive-sanctioned nor among the seven ceremonial inks enumerated in the Master Ledger of Inks. The Archive accordingly holds nothing that anyone is permitted to use and nothing that has been consigned to conceptual retirement; it is, in the phrasing of the office circular of 14 Ventôse, "the room for inks between rooms."

This intermediate position is the source of nearly all administrative difficulty associated with the holding. Ordinance on Ephemeral Inks, clause 9, provides that a medium which has ceased to be sanctioned but has not been retired remains "the property of its last sanctioned use," a phrase that has never been fully construed. The Archive of Retired Methods contends that the phrase vests custody in the last office to have employed the ink; the Office of Proprietary Inks maintains that it vests the ink in the Archive of Retired Inks itself, which is thereby both custodian and proprietor and can answer no one. The question has been referred twice to the Sub-basement Cataloguing Corps, which has twice declined jurisdiction on the grounds that it catalogues methods and not media.

The Sallow Recension

The Archive's foundational holding is the Sallow Recension, a family of twelve yellow-brown inks derived from Scribe's Iron Gall by the substitution of a tannin the Archive's own finding aid declines to name, on the reasoning that naming it would constitute a recipe. The Recension was drawn up in the winter of the fourteenth year of the present concordance cycle, when the Office of Proprietary Inks withdrew Scribe's Iron Gall from use in daylight hours following an incident on Floor 212 that the Office has never described in writing. The twelve formulations were placed in cabinet, and the cabinet sealed, and the seal renewed annually by a clerk who is not told what is inside it.

Later cataloguers have disputed whether the Sallow Recension is a recension at all. Challenge 44-B argues that a recension requires a common text, and that twelve inks sharing a tannin are a family and not a recension, and that the Archive's use of the word has improperly implied a textual authority the holding does not possess. The Office of Proprietary Inks has answered that the word is used in its commercial sense. No further answer has been entered.

Inventory of the sealed ranges

The Archive's closed cabinets are listed in the register of Sub-Basement 7 under three headings, of which the third is anomalous and has been queried repeatedly:

• Range A — the Sallow Recension (twelve formulations; sealed; not to be opened for inspection without the Keeper's countersign).
• Range B — proprietary inks under active claim by the Office of Proprietary Inks (one hundred and nine formulations; the claim in each case being against Scribe's Iron Gall).
• Range C — the unopened cabinet (one cabinet; contents unknown; keys kept in the door).

The keys kept in the door of the Range C cabinet have been replaced eleven times since the register was begun. No entry records their removal.

Relation to the Cadre of Fading Inks

The Archive is frequently confused with the Cadre of Fading Inks, and the confusion is not trivial. The Cadre is a body of persons working with inks that lose legibility by design; the Archive is a room containing inks that have lost legibility by neglect. In 3011 the two were jointly cited in a dispute over the disposal of forty vials recovered from a stairwell between Floors 88 and 89, the Cadre claiming the vials as working stock and the Archive claiming them as unadmitted holdings. The vials were ultimately divided: thirty-eight to the Cadre, two to the Archive, the latter two being the ones whose labels had faded past reading. The Archive has since cited the division as precedent for the principle that illegibility, and not provenance, determines its interest in a medium.

"Where a medium can no longer be read, the question of who wrote with it is of antiquarian interest only. The Archive does not collect antiquities."

— Office of Proprietary Inks, memorandum to the Sub-basement Cataloguing Corps, 3012

Access and the visiting rule

The Archive is not open to consultation. Formulations are supplied to other offices only as reconstitutions prepared by the Archive of Unstable Media, which has held since its founding that a retired ink cannot be examined in its retired state without being disturbed, and that what the Archive in fact stores is a series of agreements about what the inks once were. Visiting clerks are required to sign the Corridor Delta register and to leave their pen at the desk. The rule is old and its purpose is no longer recorded; it is enforced.

Contested questions

The principal scholarly disagreement concerns the status of inks retired by their own manufacturer rather than by the Tower. The Office of Proprietary Inks holds that such an ink enters the Archive automatically upon cessation of manufacture, since there is no longer any party who could sanction it. The Archive of Retired Methods holds that automatic entry is impossible, because admission requires a petition, and a defunct maker cannot petition; the ink must therefore remain outside every category indefinitely. The disagreement is not merely doctrinal. Some ninety vials of retired proprietary ink are presently held in a corridor alcove pending its resolution, and the alcove has been measured for cabinets three times.

A subsidiary dispute concerns whether the Archive should be indexed in the Master Ledger of Inks at all. The Ledger's compiler has refused, on the ground that the Ledger enumerates inks and the Archive enumerates absences. The Archive's finding aid, which is three volumes and has never been printed, takes the contrary view and includes a full index of the Ledger's omissions, running to forty pages, most of which are blank.