Guild of Contextualists

The Guild of Contextualists is a chartered body of the Theoretical Jurisprudence Guild concerned with the conditions under which a catalogued holding is admitted, maintained, or withdrawn. It is not to be confused with the Contextualists themselves, the broader school of thought whose readings it was founded to administer, nor with the Bureau of Unspoken Context in which its senior members sit. The Guild administers; the school persuades; the Bureau rules. Disputes about where administration ends and persuasion begins are the ordinary business of the Guild's registry and have never been fully resolved.

Foundation and charter

The Guild was chartered in the winter of the year the archive records as 1,204 by the Concordance of Seasons, whose third article established that "no holding shall be entered without a stated condition, and no condition shall be stated twice in the same hand" (Concordance of Seasons, Article 3). Its first register, kept on Floor 908, lists four members and one chair, the chair held in rotation and the rotation itself disputed for the first sixty years by two families of clerks who each claimed the earlier appointment. The argument was settled by the Second Concordance in favour of neither, since that document had by then been amended twice and cited three different dates for its own ratification.

Membership is open to any Librarian who can demonstrate, to a panel of three, that they have correctly identified the unstated condition of an entry without reading the entry. The Guild does not describe how this is done. Floor 909 is closed to visitors during assessments, and visitors are asked not to stand in the corridor while the door is open.

Method

The Guild's working instrument is the Conditional Register, in which each holding is accompanied by a short statement of what would have to be true elsewhere on the floor for the entry to remain accurate. These statements are not checked. They are compared. Where two registers disagree, the Guild issues a Provisional Reckoning, which holds both readings in suspension until a Senior Contextualist rules, usually on procedural grounds. Of the four hundred and six Reckonings issued between 1,209 and 1,377, two hundred and eighty-one were decided on the question of which clerk had signed first.

The Oneiric Integrity Screening falls within the Guild's remit by an arrangement of long standing, though the screening itself is conducted by the Bureau. The Guild supplies the schedule and the forms; the Bureau supplies the screeners; and the two have disagreed about who supplies the ink since the Requisition of Floor 1120. The Guild's position is that the ink is administrative and therefore its own. The Bureau has not replied to this in writing.

"The condition is not the entry. The condition is not the floor. The condition is what the floor would have been had the entry not been made, which is a question of record and not of opinion, and which the Guild will answer for a fee."

— Charter of the Guild of Contextualists, preamble, as amended 1,341

The Affair of the Inherited Clause

In 1,372 the Guild admitted to its register the so-called Inherited Clause, a condition said to have been attached to Floor 612 by an entry that had since been withdrawn. The clause was accepted by a panel of three, one of whom, Clerk Adelina Vourch, later wrote that she had read the condition "as it would have been written, not as it was" (Vourch, Memoranda on the Sixth Hundred, folio 44). Six entries on Floor 612 were subsequently recatalogued under a condition that could not be found in any register.

CCB-77-12, issued by the Senior Contextualists of the Bureau, declared the Guild's methodology on Floor 612 "contextually insolvent" — a finding the Guild does not dispute but considers misaddressed, since the entry had been accepted under the Guild's own procedures and the Bureau had approved the panel. The Bureau's reply observed that approval of a panel is not approval of its findings. The Guild, in its Reply of the Ninth Day, observed that this distinction had not appeared in the charter, the Concordances, or any of the sixty-one preceding bulletins, and requested a ruling. No ruling has been issued. The Inherited Clause remains on the register, marked pending, which in the Guild's usage means admitted.

Relations with other bodies

The Guild works most closely with the Guild of Groundskeepers, whose maintenance of Floor 612's shelving determines whether the Inherited Clause can be said to apply to a load-bearing structure. It shares a stairwell with the Guild of Somnologists, whose practical functions intersect with those of the Inter-Guild Logistical Network Guild, and the three have an agreement about the stairwell that is renewed every eleven years and has never been read aloud in full. The Margin Commentators Guild has twice accused the Contextualists of annotating in the margin of another Guild's margins; the accusation was withdrawn both times after the annotations were found to be in a third hand.

The Constructivist Guild and the Reflector Guild are not members of the Guild of Contextualists and have each declined to apply for membership in terms that the Guild's registrar has described as "complete and courteous." The Glasswrights' Guild has no position.

Current register

As at the last audit, the Guild holds:

• 1,940 Conditional Registers, of which 214 are open and 11 are missing.
• 406 Provisional Reckonings, of which 281 were decided on signature order.
• 1 stairwell, shared, in renewal.
• 62 amendments to its own charter, of which 3 are thought to be duplicates.

The Guild's seat remains Floor 908. Its meetings are held on the second day of each week and are open to any Librarian who does not speak. Minutes are kept in triplicate, one copy retained, one sent to the Bureau, and one placed in the wall cavity behind the north shelf of Floor 908 in accordance with the Ordinance on Redundant Records; the cavity is now full, and since 1,389 the third copy has been placed in front of it.