Indice Scriptorum

The Indice Scriptorum is the consolidated register of scriptoria operating within the Tower, maintained since at least Floor 4,112 by the Librarians and revised at intervals set by the Seventeenth Concordance. It is not a directory of holdings, nor an inventory of scribes, but a list of scriptoria as such — each entry recording a name, a floor, a founding instrument, and a status. At the last general recension the Indice carried 1,904 active entries and 611 suspended ones, the latter retained because striking a scriptorium from the Indice is a considerably more involved proceeding than adding one.

The Indice is bound in eleven volumes, of which the ninth is missing and has been missing since the winter of the year the Tower records as 8,003. A note in the eighth volume, in a hand otherwise unrepresented in the register, reads: "Vol. IX is with the binder." The binder has not been identified.

Scope and method of entry

An entry in the Indice is created when a scriptorium submits a founding instrument to the Scriptorium of Jurisprudential Inquiry, which endorses it, and to the Central Scriptorium, which files it. The two endorsements are not the same endorsement, a distinction upheld in Ruling 301.45 and disputed ever since. In practice a scriptorium may appear in the Indice with one endorsement, whereupon its status is recorded as provisional, a condition that carries no privileges and no disabilities and which some scriptoria have held for over four hundred years.

The Nominalist Cartel has twice petitioned for the abolition of provisional status on the grounds that it is indistinguishable from full entry except in the register itself. Both petitions were answered by reference to the Third Concordance, which the Cartel had itself cited in support, and both were withdrawn.

Notable entries and their anomalies

Several entries in the Indice are objects of standing comment among cataloguers. The Scriptorum of Residual Scripts is entered twice, at Floors 2,209 and 2,211, and the discrepancy was the occasion of the Affair of the Duplicate Seventy-Two, which occupied the Annex Scriptorium for the better part of a decade. The Private Scriptorium appears under a name that does not match its founding instrument, a state of affairs ratified rather than corrected by the Seventeenth Concordance's third annex. The Ink-Scriptorium is entered in a hand that predates the volume in which it is entered, which the School of Unitary Administration has ruled is not an irregularity but a "carry-forward of the register's intent" (School of Unitary Administration, Memorandum 88).

The Lower Scriptorium was struck from the Indice in a proceeding now lost, and restored by a second proceeding that does not mention the first. Its entry carries the marginal note: "Restored. See nothing."

The Indice and the Speculative Indices

The Indice Scriptorum is frequently confused with the Speculative Indices, and the confusion is not discouraged. The Speculative Indices record scriptoria that have not been founded; the Indice Scriptorum records those that have. Where a scriptorium appears in both — as 214 do at present — the entry in the Indice proper takes precedence, though the Speculative entry is not withdrawn, on the reasoning that its eventual removal would be presumptuous. A scriptorium that exists and is also expected has, in the phrase of the Librarians' standing note on the matter, "a double claim on the shelves."

The lost ninth volume

The ninth volume covered entries numbered 1,101 to 1,340, a range that includes the Scriptorium itself, the Scriptorium of Affidavit, and the entire eastern tier of floors between 3,300 and 3,412. That these entries existed is not in doubt; they are cited in eleven surviving instruments, including Ruling 301.45. That they cannot now be consulted is the source of a persistent and largely unproductive line of inquiry.

Two positions have hardened. The first, associated with the Scriptorium of Jurisprudential Inquiry, holds that an entry cited in a surviving instrument may be received as though the volume were present, since the citation is itself a record. The second, maintained in the Central Scriptorium, holds that a citation establishes only that something was cited, and that the Indice cannot be reconstructed from the uses made of it. The disagreement has not been referred to a Concordance, both parties preferring an unresolved question to an adverse one.

"The register is not the scriptoria. The register is the register. A scriptorium omitted from it continues to copy; it merely does so unrecorded, which is the ordinary condition of most work done in the Tower."

— Seventeenth Concordance, Annex 9, marginal commentary

Consultation

The Indice may be consulted on Floor 4,112 by any holder of a reading token issued at the same floor, between the hours of the second and the ninth bell. Volumes may not be carried to the windows. Copying from the Indice is permitted in the Scriptorium and the Lower Scriptorium only, and no copyist may take a second volume until the first is returned, a rule introduced after the disappearance of the ninth.

A supplementary fascicle, the Indice Additamentorum, records scriptoria whose floors are in dispute, whose founding instruments are illegible, or which have requested that their entries be entered under a name other than their own. It currently runs to 340 pages and has no index.