Ink Reconciliation

Definition

Ink Reconciliation is the general term for the class of procedures by which the Tower establishes that a given quantity of ink, having been withdrawn from custody at one point, is the same ink when it arrives at another. It is distinct from, and prior to, the Annual Reconciliation of Inks, which is a single statutory event; Ink Reconciliation is the standing obligation from which that event derives its authority. Where the Annual Reconciliation answers the question "does this registered batch conform to current standard frequencies", Ink Reconciliation answers the narrower and considerably older question "is this still the same ink".

The procedure is administered by the Ink-Mixing Guild through the Treasury of Ink, with counter-signature required from the Office of Ontic Verification. Batches eligible for reconciliation are drawn from the Master Ledger of Inks.

Historical development

The earliest recorded reconciliation practice is associated with the Ink Provenance Project, whose scribes established that a vessel's seal, once broken, destroyed the only unambiguous evidence of identity. The Project's response — the doubled weighment, in which a batch is weighed on withdrawal and again on arrival, with the two figures entered on facing pages — remains the mechanical core of the procedure. The Project's own report on the Ferrous Gall Ink discrepancy of the fourthReckoning attributed the loss of eleven measures to "ordinary evaporation, compounded by a clerk who did not write the first figure down".

The passage of the Concordance of Weights, Second Recension regularised the doubled weighment into law but introduced the difficulty that the two weighments were performed on different floors, at different altitudes, under different air. The Ink-Subcommittee addressed this in its Session 9 ruling by declaring all reconcilement weighments to be taken at Floor 0, regardless of where custody had transferred — a decision that has been criticized for requiring, in practice, the transport of the ink to a floor that some records do not list as existing.

The three tests

Contemporary practice recognises three ordered tests. The test of measure compares the doubled weighments. The test of script compares a specimen stroke drawn from the arrived batch against the specimen stroke drawn at withdrawal, under fixed magnification and fixed illumination. The test of relation — added by amendment to the Fourth Concordance and never removed, despite the Fifth Concordance Annex 3 purporting to remove it — confirms that the ink still stands in its recorded relation to the surface it was drawn for, since certain inks, notably Chronal Fugue Ink, retain correct weight and correct script while ceasing entirely to belong to the vellum they were mixed for.

The test of relation is the most frequently failed and the most frequently waived. In the Winter Session of the year catalogued as 4,411, the Vellum Amp Conservatory Administrative Spire recorded twenty-two consecutive failures of relation on batches of Certified Archival Ink that had passed both measure and script without difficulty; the Spire attributed the anomaly to "the cold, or to something the cold is standing in for", and the batches were released.

"A batch that weighs what it weighed and writes what it wrote is not thereby reconciled. Ink is not a weight. Ink is a promise to a surface."

— Ink Provenance Project, Preliminary Findings, clause 12

Disputed scope

The Third Concordance defines Ink Reconciliation as applying only to inks held in Guild custody, which would exclude, among others, the Sleeping Ink held under the proprietary arrangement recorded in Sleeping Ink Proprietary Formulation, and the Petitioner's Ink held by the Treasury for petitioners not resident on Guild floors. The Sixth Concordance contradicts this by requiring reconciliation "of all ink, wherever it rests". The Ink-Subcommittee has historically resolved the contradiction in favour of whichever reading permits it to conclude the Session before the cold sets in, which in practice means the narrower one.

A minority position, associated with the archivist Halbrecht of the Ninth Scriptorium, holds that reconciliation is incoherent as a concept unless the ink is understood to change continuously, in which case the procedure is not a comparison but a periodic re-issue. This view is not supported by any Concordance and is generally treated as a matter for the School of Chromatic Resonance, whose interests lie elsewhere.

Practical notes

Reconcilement weighments are taken in the room marked B-4 on the Treasury's floor plan. Containers larger than one measure are not admitted; the door will not close on them, and the scale will not notice them. Reconciliation proceedings pause twice daily for the Ledger-clerk's reading, and are suspended entirely during the Annual Reconciliation of Inks, which supersedes them for the duration.