Iconoclastic Scriptorium

The Iconoclastic Scriptorium is the Tower's sole scriptorium mandated to destroy images, and the only scriptorium in the archive whose own seal is not permitted to bear one. It occupies the eastern third of the Scriptorium Annex on a floor catalogued as the Fixed Ladder's ninth landing, and operates under a charter granted in the eleventh year of the Concordance of Assize, subsequently amended without being repealed. Its clerks are called Breakers, a title they dislike and use themselves.

The Scriptorium exists to remove figuration from the Tower's holdings — illuminated initials, marginal beasts, portrait bosses, the small recurring face that appears in the colophons of the Upper Scriptorium and that nobody has ever claimed to have drawn. It does not destroy books. This distinction, insisted upon in every communication the Scriptorium has issued since its founding, is the source of most of its difficulties.

Foundation and the Charter of the Eleventh Year

The Scriptorium was established after the Edict of Unmarked Margins found that certain illustrations were "influencing the reading of pages they did not touch" (Edict of Unmarked Margins, clause 9). The Central Scriptorium delegated the work to the Annex, which delegated it to a committee of four, which delegated it to a single clerk, Breaker Ossian Vell, who was not consulted and who has never fully accepted the delegation. Vell's objection, entered into the record and never answered, was that a scriptorium is a place where marks are made, and that calling it iconoclastic was "asking a furnace to be cold" (Annex Minute 4,112).

The charter nonetheless specifies that the Scriptorium be staffed, inked, and supplied as any scriptorium is, and that its product be "the absence of the image, rendered with the same care as the image itself" (Charter of the Eleventh Year, clause 3). Breakers therefore work at ordinary sloping desks with ordinary pens and ordinary lampblack. Nothing distinguishes the room from its neighbours except that the finished work is a hole where an initial used to be.

Method and the Erasure Ledger

Each erasure is entered in the Erasure Ledger of the Eastern Third, a bound volume of 2,208 folios held in the Final Recourse vault for reasons that have never been explained to the Scriptorium. Entries record the volume, folio, dimensions of the removed figure, ink type, and a short written description of what was removed, since by the time the entry is signed the figure no longer exists to be examined. This creates a documented class of objects known as described-only images, which may not be reproduced, restored, or requested by name.

The Scriptorium's own seal, cut in the second year, depicts a hand holding a pen over nothing. Under the charter's clause 7 the seal may not itself contain an image, and the hand has been ruled in successive internal opinions to be a "tool-reference" rather than a figure. Scriptorium of Jurisprudential Inquiry has declined three times to settle the question, noting that it cannot hear a case in which the disputed object is the instrument by which the case would be sealed.

Jurisdictional Dispute with the Ink-Scriptorium

The Scriptorium's ink is drawn from the Ink-Scriptorium Supply Line, and therein lies its longest-running quarrel. The Ink-Scriptorium supplies lampblack in three grades, of which the Scriptorium requires only the coarsest, since fine ink is needed for detail and the Scriptorium produces the opposite of detail. It has petitioned for a fourth grade, designated a "void grade," and been refused on the grounds that no such ink exists and that the request is therefore not a request for ink.

"We are asked to compound a substance whose only property is that it leaves nothing. The Ink-Scriptorium has no recipe for nothing. We have looked."

— Ink-Scriptorium, Reply to Petition 88, fourth recension

The Scriptorium has since made its own void grade, informally called Vell's grey, by diluting coarse lampblack with rainwater from the eastern gutter. It is not approved for use on holdings above the ninth landing. It is used on holdings above the ninth landing.

The Winter Blanks of the Seventh Landing

In a winter remembered in Annex records only as the Grey Winter, a Breaker named Clerk Amaranth Sill was assigned to the Scriptorium of Damp Vells and, through a filing error, erased the initials of four volumes that had been sent to be dried rather than defaced. Three were restored from duplicate copies. The fourth, a psalter with no duplicate, retains at each chapter head a clean rectangular blank, and the Scriptorium has since ruled that these blanks are themselves the correct reading and may not be filled. Sill was reassigned to the Scriptorium of Latent Verbs and is cited in the Erasure Ledger as the authority for the principle that "an erasure once made is part of the text" (Erasure Ledger, entry 1,884).

Visitors to the eastern third must leave their seals at the door. The Scriptorium has no images on its walls, and the wall where an image would ordinarily hang is marked with a small painted rectangle indicating where it does not.

Scholarly Disagreement

The Fourth Concordance holds that the Scriptorium's work is preservative, since it keeps the surrounding text legible by removing what distracts from it (Fourth Concordance, Annex 2). The Seventh Concordance holds the reverse, that a removed image is a lost image and the Scriptorium is therefore an instrument of loss however carefully it is filed (Seventh Concordance, clause 40). The Concordance of Assize contradicts both, asserting that the question is settled and need not be discussed, without stating which way.

The Scriptorium's own position, recorded once and never repeated, is that it does not make images and does not destroy books, and that everything else is a matter for the Concordances. Breaker Ossian Vell, asked at the end of his service whether the Scriptorium had succeeded, is recorded as having said only that the pages were very clean. The remark is preserved in the Erasure Ledger as entry 2,001, classified under remarks, with no image attached.