Guild Standard 22-Σ

Guild Standard 22-Σ is a regulatory instrument of the Horticultural Guild setting out the environmental stresses to which Silent Books must be subjected before release from the bindery. Issued in the Guild's twenty-second cycle and revised four times, it is the only Guild Standard whose subject matter lies wholly outside the Guild's botanical remit, a circumstance that has never been satisfactorily explained and which the Concordance of Instruments has twice declined to examine. The standard is short — eleven clauses and a stress schedule — and is cited chiefly in disputes concerning the Compilers' Guild's cross-referential verification sequences, which depend on the behaviour of Silent Books under load.

Origin and the bindery petition

Guild Standard 22-Σ arose from a petition entered by the binders of the Ninth Bindery in the winter of the cycle's second year, following the loss of a consignment of eleven Silent Books to what the petition calls "ordinary reading conditions." The books had been shelved in a corridor where the humidity was known to fluctuate with the operation of the Aperture 4 lift, and had begun to emit text that had not been set into them. The binders asked the Horticultural Guild, rather than their own, to draft the test schedule, on the grounds that the Guild already maintained the Tower's most complete instrument for measuring slow environmental change, having spent nine cycles on the photoperiod tolerances recorded in Guild Standard 114 Delta 7b on the Nutrient Solution and Photoperiod for Lumen Moss.

The choice has been contested ever since. The Annals of Jurisprudence records the objection of the Clerk of Instruments, one Ovra Benn, who noted in her fifth memorial that a standard governing books had been placed in the hands of a body "which has never in its history bound a single quire, and which measures damp chiefly in order to grow things in it." Benn's objection was entered without prejudice and has never been withdrawn.

The stress schedule

The schedule specifies four stresses, applied in fixed sequence and each held for a stated interval: saturated air at 31 parts, dry heat, sustained vibration at the frequency of the neighbouring stairwell, and a final period of total silence in a dark room. The intervals are given in the schedule itself and are not to be shortened by local arrangement. The fourth stress is the one most often argued over, since a Silent Book subjected to silence tends, by the account of the Ninth Bindery, to become "more so," and the point at which this ceases to be a test and becomes a change of state is not addressed in the standard.

Clause 7 requires that the test chamber be resealed after each use and that the seal be witnessed by a Librarian of the second grade. Where no second-grade Librarian is available, the seal may be witnessed by two first-grade Librarians standing apart from one another. Chamber 22-Σ-b has not been resealed since the third revision, and the schedule is currently run in Chamber 22-Σ-c.

Relation to the Compilers' Guild

Guild Standard 22-Σ is not certified to the Compilers' Guild and does not appear in the cross-reference tables that Guild Standard 115delta1a establishes for procedural management. In practice the Compilers apply it anyway, because Guild Standard 115Δ1a certifies the Compilers for verification sequences whose third stage cannot be performed on an unstressed book. The Compilers' Guild therefore maintains its own recension of 22-Σ, differing from the Guild's in the order of the second and third stresses, and the two recensions have never been reconciled.

"The order is not a matter of taste. A book vibrated before it is dried will hold its silence through both; a book dried before it is vibrated will not. The Guild has the sequence backwards and has had it backwards since the fourth revision."

— Memorial of the Compilers' Guild on the Recension of 22-Σ, clause 2

The Horticultural Guild has not replied to the memorial in writing. Its position, as recorded in the minutes of the Instruments Committee for the following cycle, is that the sequence was fixed by the original petition and that a standard is not amended because a later body finds its own convenience served by a different order.

Disputed readings

The principal scholarly disagreement concerns clause 4, which requires the test chamber to be brought to "the temperature of a working scriptorium." The Guild's commentary glosses this as 19 degrees; the Compilers' recension glosses it as 21; and the Guild of Exactitude's Calibration Annex has declined to furnish a figure, observing that the Annex calibrates instruments and not rooms. A minority reading, advanced by the archivist Sern of the Low Stacks and generally thought to be a misprision, holds that the clause refers not to a temperature at all but to the number of persons who may be present during the test, and that the schedule has therefore been run with the wrong number of witnesses for eleven cycles.

A secondary dispute concerns whether the stress schedule applies to books already shelved. Clause 11 says it does not, but the Boundary Stelae inscription at the head of the Ninth Bindery stair records a ruling of the Second Concordance to the contrary, and the inscription has never been struck. Books in the Low Stacks are accordingly tested on entry and, in some readings, on exit.

Inventory of the test chamber

The contents of Chamber 22-Σ-c, as returned by the last survey, are as follows:

• one stress frame, brass, marked 22-Σ on the third leg;
• four Silent Books, three of them sealed and one of them not;
• a hygrometer of the Gtm Ge pattern, reading two parts high;
• the surveyor's stool, which is not to be removed.

The stool has been listed in every survey since the chamber was commissioned. No survey has recorded who is entitled to sit on it.