Guild Standards for Fluid Media Gsfm

Definition and scope

Guild Standards for Fluid Media (abbreviated GSFM) is the collective designation for the corpus of ink specifications issued and enforced by the Inkmixing Guild. The Standards govern fluid writing media in all their states — aqueous, oleaginous, and the intermediate classes catalogued under Ordinance of Fluid Jurisdiction — and are cited more frequently in inter-guild disputes than any other body of technical writing in the Tower. The GSFM corpus is not a single document but an accumulating stack of individually numbered standards, each of which may be amended, withdrawn, or quietly superseded without notice to holders of the preceding text.

The most consequential of these is GSFM-Δ-7, the standard fixing spectral absorption tolerance and temporal-fade resistance for black registry ink. It is also the standard most often cited by parties who have not read it.

Structure of the corpus

The Standards are numbered by Greek-letter series, each series addressing a family of media properties. The alpha series deals with drying behaviour; the beta series with vehicle composition; the gamma series with pigment suspension; the delta series with optical and archival performance, in which GSFM-Δ-7 sits at position seven of a sequence whose positions one through six have been withdrawn, retained, withdrawn again, and in two cases reissued under different letters. A reader consulting the delta series in the reference annex of the Guild of Archivists will therefore find seven headings and four surviving documents.

The omega series, issued rather late in the history of the Standards, addresses media that decline to remain fluid. Its single surviving entry concerns inks which, upon cooling past a stated temperature, cease to flow and must be reconstituted before use; the Archive of Unstable Media holds three such reconstitutions in its care, of which one has been reconstituted four times.

Relation to Ordinance Beta

The GSFM corpus and Ordinance Beta occupy overlapping ground, and the boundary between them has been the subject of a dispute older than any current signatory. Ordinance Beta governs the production of certified lampblack ink and specifies acceptable fuels for soot generation, while the GSFM delta series governs the optical performance of the resulting product. In practice this means that a manufacturer may satisfy every clause of Ordinance Beta and still fail GSFM-Δ-7 on temporal-fade resistance, a situation the Inkmixing Guild regards as correct and the producers of Lampblack Based Ink regard as provocation.

The two bodies of text disagree, additionally, on whether soot generated from resinous fuels constitutes lampblack at all. Ordinance Beta lists permitted fuels in an annex; the GSFM delta series defines the resulting pigment by its absorption spectrum without reference to origin. Both positions are defensible and neither has been withdrawn.

Amendment and citation practice

Amendments to the GSFM are issued as addenda bearing their own numbers, which are not required to be sequential with respect to the standards they amend. A citation of "GSFM-Δ-7 as amended" is therefore ambiguous unless the addendum is named, and the Tower's scribes have adopted the convention of citing the specific addendum number in every formal reference. This convention is observed in approximately one citation in four.

The Scribes' Guild maintains a concordance of GSFM citations appearing in Tower documents, revised annually. The most recent revision recorded 1,144 citations of GSFM-Δ-7, of which 309 named an addendum, 41 named an addendum that does not exist, and 6 named an addendum belonging to a different standard entirely. The clerk responsible for the revision, identified in the margins only as "H. of the 214th," appended the note: the remaining 757 speak of the standard as though it had not changed since it was issued, which it has, repeatedly, and on one occasion backwards.

The Spectral Ink Controversy

The GSFM delta series was drawn into the Spectral Ink Controversy when the Librarians unilaterally reclassified spectral-phase writing media, placing a class of inks that vary with viewing angle outside the scope of the Standards entirely. The Inkmixing Guild disputed the reclassification on the grounds that GSFM-Δ-7's absorption tolerance band, insisted upon by Elara Vance in her capacity as consul on matters of legibility, was drafted to cover precisely such media by their measured behaviour rather than by their mechanism. The dispute remains unresolved and is currently held in adjournment before the Third Concordance, whose own text on the matter has been amended twice since the adjournment began.

Adjacent guilds have taken positions. The Guild of Calibrators hold that any standard specifying absorption to a tolerance band presupposes a calibration authority, which they assert to be themselves. The Guild of Exactitude holds a competing assertion. Neither is named in the GSFM text.

Standing and enforcement

Compliance with the GSFM is enforced by the Inkmixing Guild through inspection of registry inks submitted for certification, a process documented in Protocols for Impermanent Media where the media in question is expected to last less than a standard inspection cycle. Media failing the delta series are not prohibited from use; they are prohibited from being called registry ink, a distinction that has been the subject of litigation on at least three floors.

Visitors to the Standards annex are reminded that the reference copies are not to be removed from the reading room, that the reading room closes for recitation of the omega series on the eighth day of each month, and that inks brought in for comparison must be decanted into the provided vessels rather than applied to the margins of the reference copies, notwithstanding the convenience of the practice.