Curators of the Anechoic Galleries

Scope of the office

The Curators of the Anechoic Galleries are the collegial body charged with the custody, classification, and acoustic maintenance of the Anechoic Galleries, a post held collectively rather than by named individuals and therefore recorded in the Tower's registers under the collective designation alone. The office is one of the oldest attached to the Galleries, predating the current arrangement of Case File 2001-44/B by an interval the Concordances do not agree upon. Their writ extends over the proper Galleries on Floor 107, the contiguous Lower Stacks of Floor 1442 the Anechoic Galleries, and — by the Second Recension of the Stack Census — the whole 48-level vertical subsection formally designated the Floor 1442 the Anechoic Galleries.

The Curators do not hold their office by appointment in the ordinary sense. New members are seated by a process the Fourth Concordance describes only as "assent of the room," a phrase annotated in the margins of three surviving copies with successive expressions of dissatisfaction. The number of Curators at any given time is likewise unstated; the Tower's own audit records for the office list "present, indeterminate" in the column reserved for headcount.

Custody of the specimen

The Curators' most consequential responsibility is the oversight of Specimen 881-422 ("The Silent Bell"), the great bell housed within the Anechoic Galleries at Aperture Gamma on Floor 312 and, more recently, controversially relocated to the Lower Stacks. The bell's silence is maintained by standing ordinance, and any alteration to its state — including the ringing of a brass bell ordered for the morning hours on Floor 1442 the Anechoic Galleries — requires the Curators' recorded assent, which is entered into the case file in the hand of whichever member is nearest the ledger.

The Year of the Silent Bell Event tested this custody severely. When the Great Bell failed to sound at the appointed hour, the Curators issued a joint statement holding that the event constituted neither a malfunction nor an omission, but a continuation of the bell's existing condition, and that no minutes were therefore owing. The statement is preserved in The Anechoic Reliquary and is cited by later writers as an early example of the office's characteristic interpretive method.

Relations with neighbouring curatorial bodies

The Curators of the Anechoic Galleries maintain an uneasy but long-standing correspondence with the Curators of Resonance, who claim jurisdiction over any object whose failure produces a measurable acoustic consequence. The two offices have never reconciled their claims over the Silent Bell's ringing: the Curators of Resonance maintain that a silent bell is by definition outside their purview, while the present body maintains that its silence is precisely the acoustic consequence at issue. The dispute has been referred to the Seventh Concordance, Annex 9, and remains open.

Relations with the Curators of Lacunae are more cordial, owing to a shared interest in the preservation of gaps in the record. An annual exchange of correspondence is customary, conducted by leaving blank slips in the same drawer. Relations with the Atrium Curators are governed entirely by the provisions of Case File 2001-44/B and are not otherwise discussed in the record.

Administrative standing

The office draws its authority from Case File 2001-44/B, which serves as the administrative backbone of the Galleries and, by extension, of the Curators themselves. Under this instrument the Curators are empowered to requisition, relocate, and seal specimens within their jurisdiction, a power exercised most famously in the movement of the Silent Bell to the Lower Stacks and most often in the sealing of shelves whose contents have become, in the office's preferred formulation, "acoustically inappropriate."

"The Curators shall keep the Galleries quiet, and shall keep a record of the quiet, and shall not be required to reconcile one with the other."

— Case File 2001-44/B, Clause 12

Disputed chronology

The Tower's records disagree about the founding of the office. The Third Recension of the Stack Census places the first seating of Curators before the construction of The Specimen Stair, which would make the office older than the Galleries it administers. The Second Recension places it after, and attributes the founding to a Librarian whose name is recorded only as "the one who objected." A marginal note in the Concordance of Apertures, of uncertain date and authorship, suggests the two accounts describe the same event viewed from opposite ends of the corridor.

A separate and unresolved question concerns the Curators' relationship to the Induction of a Living Tome, a rite performed within the Galleries at intervals that no record has successfully regularized. Whether the inducting party is the Curators themselves, a delegate of the Librarians, or the Tome alone is a matter on which the Concordances are silent in one annexe and emphatic in the next.

Notes on visiting

Visitors to the Galleries are admitted between the second and fourth hour of the morning, provided they do not carry a bell. The Curators do not conduct tours.