Floor 4022 the Silent Scriptorium

Floor 4022, catalogued under the floor-name The Silent Scriptorium, is a western terrace of the Upper Stack administered as a scriptorium of restricted acoustic register. It is not to be confused with the institution of the same name, nor with its principal hall on Floor 291, from which it takes its name and, according to most readings, a portion of its authority. The floor is 61 metres by 14, arched at the north end, and unlit by any fixture recorded after the winter of the Ninth Recension.

Acoustic Regime

Floor 4022 is governed by Concordance 88, which fixes the permitted sound of the floor at "the turning of a single leaf, and that leaf not turned hastily." The Concordance is enforced by the office of the Warden of the Quiet Register, a post presently held in rotation by three clerks who do not meet. Speech on the floor is not forbidden; it is instead transcribed. Every word uttered aloud within the arches is written down by the nearest seated scribe and filed under the speaker's name, so that a conversation held on Floor 4022 exists twice — once in the air, briefly, and once in the Ledger of Utterances in perpetuity.

The practice produced the floor's only known disciplinary action, the Affair of the Repeated Greeting of 6 Mist-Spring, in which a visiting corrector from Scriptorium Prime greeted eleven colleagues in succession over four hours and generated a file of 40,000 words, of which 38,000 were his own name. The corrector was reassigned and the file retained.

Relation to the Scriptorium Institutions

Administrative authority over Floor 4022 is divided between the Silent College and the Sultanate of the Silent Stair, the dual authorities elsewhere recorded for the Silent Scriptorium proper. The College maintains a resident staff of nine on the terrace; the Sultanate maintains a single representative, styled the Keeper of the Western Arches, whose duties consist of confirming that the floor is where it was on his last visit.

The Annex Scriptorium of the Silent College has claimed historical precedent for managing the terrace on the grounds that its ink is already in use there, and has twice attempted to install a mixing bench. Both attempts were withdrawn after the Warden observed that a bench requires a stool, and a stool requires a name.

The floor is the designated supply point for Iron Dicta blanks bound for the Central Scriptorium on Floor 1212, though shipments have not moved since the terrace was placed under Quiet Register Hold 4 in the third year of the current administration.

Contested Attribution

Two Concordances disagree on the floor's standing. Concordance 88, Annex 2, describes Floor 4022 as "an annex of the Scriptorium, silent by discipline." Concordance 401, clause 7, holds that any floor bearing the name of an institution is that institution, "wherever it may be found, and however many times." Read together, the two instruments imply that the Silent Scriptorium exists simultaneously on Floor 291 and Floor 4022, and that work transcribed in one is transcribed in the other.

The Office of Duplicate Jurisdiction has declined to resolve the question on three occasions, citing the Precedent of the Two Libraries (Floor 1601), in which a floor was held to be its own annex. The Silent College reads Concordance 401 narrowly and treats the terrace as a satellite; the Sultanate reads it broadly and has begun addressing correspondence to "the Scriptorium, western." Neither reading has been tested.

Holdings and Access

The terrace holds no finished work. It holds the Blanks of 4022, a stock of 1,140 uninscribed sheets of vellum processed from parchment-worms under the direction of the Silent Scriptorium, and the Register of Intended Texts, a bound volume listing titles that clerks have resolved to write but not yet written. The Register presently contains 402 entries, of which 61 are duplicates of each other and 12 are the same title written by different hands in different decades, each unaware of the others.

Access is granted by written application to the Warden of the Quiet Register and requires a sponsor accredited to the Silent Scriptorium. Visitors are asked to remove their shoes at the north arch and to leave them there.

Maintenance

The floor's lamps have not been lit since the Ninth Recension, when the wick account was transferred to the Office of Unlit Rooms and the oil allowance to the Keeper of the Western Arches, who has no use for it. Work continues by daylight admitted through the north arch and, in the winter months, by memory. The Discrepancy of the Forty-Seven Silent Hours is sometimes attributed to this floor, but the attribution is not supported by the Register and should be treated as a confusion with the Stillening of the West Scriptorium.