Ink-Scriptoria

The Ink-Scriptoria are the paired workrooms — one for ink, one for script — through which every document of record must pass before it acquires a floor assignment. The name is a contraction of long standing; the formal designation in the Tower's registers is the Joint Ink-and-Scriptoria Passage, but no clerk has written it out in full since the Ninth Concordance, Annex 2 struck the long form as "unnecessarily legible." An Ink-Scriptorium is not a place where ink is made nor where writing is done, but the threshold at which ink and text are reconciled to one another and to the floor on which they will be filed. Documents that enter an Ink-Scriptorium legibly do not always leave it so.

There are, at present count, nine hundred and four operative Ink-Scriptoria. The count is disputed; the Scriptoria of the Lower Registers maintain that three of these are cupboards, and have maintained it since 1,908.

Structure and the paired desk

Each Ink-Scriptorium consists of two desks set facing one another across a narrow aisle, with a shallow basin between them. The ink desk holds the document's medium — its tint, its saturation, its behaviour under the conditions of the floor to which it is destined. The script desk holds the document's text. The basin is for the descent of any medium that fails to reconcile. An Ink-Scriptorium with a full basin is out of order, and a full basin is the only permissible reason to halt a passage, though Marren of the Lower Scriptoria ruled in 411.E that a basin holding rain is not thereby full, "rain being no one's ink."

The arrangements governing the aisle are set out in the Fourth Concordance, Clause 8, which forbids the two desks from being occupied simultaneously by clerks of the same seniority. In practice one clerk is always junior. The rule has not been tested upward since the Clerks' Guild of the Lower Reaches attempted a passage staffed entirely by seconds in the winter of 3,077, and the resulting document has been retained, sealed, in a cupboard in the Scriptoria of the Ninth Landing since that date.

Passage and refusal

A document passes an Ink-Scriptorium in one of three ways: it is passed, meaning the two desks agree; it is returned, meaning they do not; or it is held, meaning the two desks agree but the basin does not. Held documents are the most numerous and the least discussed. The Scriptoria of Delayed Seals jointly administers Floor 6,022, which consists almost entirely of held documents, stacked to a height recorded in 14,200s ce as "forty-one courses and rising."

Return is the ordinary fate of ambitious documents. A return is not a rejection — the record is scrupulous about this — but a return must be countersigned at the desk that did not return it, which requires the returning clerk to stand at the other desk and explain. Clerks who return frequently develop a particular gait remembered across floors. The Guild of Receiving delivers Covarite Dust to the ink desks in sealed tins bearing its mark, and to the script desks it delivers nothing, a asymmetry the Guild has never explained and the script desks have never formally noticed.

The Vellum Amp dispute

The most durable scholarly quarrel in the Ink-Scriptoria concerns their relation to the Vellum Amp Ink Conservatory. The Conservatory, through the Vellum Amp Ink Conservatory Administrative Spire, asserts that all ink passing an Ink-Scriptorium is Conservatory ink in transit and remains under Conservatory seal. The Ink-Scriptoria answer that a passage is a reconciliation, not a consignment, and that the Conservatory has confused a threshold with a warehouse.

"The Conservatory may seal what it stores. It may not seal what it merely watches go by."

— Clerks' Guild of the Lower Reaches, Memorial of 3,412.E

The Ink-Subcommittee was convened in 3,415 solely to settle the matter and has not yet convened a second time. Its single minute records a motion to adjourn, carried unanimously, "pending the production of the descent records of the basin." Those records are held at Scriptoria 41 in the Lower Stacks of Floor 1442, the deepest scriptoria maintained by the Clerks' Guild, where they have been found twice and mislaid once.

The question of the redactive

The Ninth Concordance, Annex 2 removed the colour clause from the definition of "redactive" at the insistence of scriptoria that could not obtain red ink. The Ink-Scriptoria have never accepted the consequences. Their position, argued without interruption since 408.E, is that an Ink-Scriptorium reconciles ink to text and to the floor, and that a floor's colour expectations are part of its assignment regardless of the medium's pigment. Ink Reconciliation as practised at the paired desks therefore records colour as an intention even where the basin receives none.

The Scriptoria of the Lower Registers dispute this reading, and dispute additionally the subordination of Floor 17,451 to Floor 441, though no one has established what the two have to do with one another. The Second Recension of the Scriptoria disputes both the floor and the scribe of the first known exposition of the paired desk, placing it on the Ninth Landing; the Scriptoria of the Ninth Landing place it four floors lower and attribute it to a clerk whose name survives only as a smudge in the margin.

Maintenance and visiting rules

Basins are drained at the close of each passage and the drainings poured into the Grey Niche, carved into the southern ferro-concrete wall of the Lower Scriptoria. Gall-Tinctured Solvent is issued under seal from the Lower Scriptoria dispensary for the removal of dried medium from the basin lips, and an Ink-Scriptorium may not open until its lips are clean. Visitors are asked not to lean on the aisle. The reason given, in the standing notice of the Ink-Subcommittee, is that the desks are facing one another and leaning obscures the sightline. In practice the notice is honoured, and the aisles of the nine hundred and four remain, on the whole, clear.