Librarian-in-Shadow

The title Librarian-in-Shadow designates the officer of the Librarians charged with the custody, interpretation, and, where necessary, the arrest of shadows held within the Tower's collections. The office is attested from at least the seventh recension of the Concordance of Appointments (clause 14, "Of Officers Whose Persons Are Not Fully Lit") and is distinguished from ordinary curatorial rank chiefly by the fact that its holder is expected to answer for specimens that cast no light and are, in most working conditions, not present. Thirteen Librarians-in-Shadow are presently recorded on the rolls of the Administrative Spire. One of these postings is vacant, and has been since 881.

Origins and the Vestibule precedent

The office arose out of the difficulties following the discovery of the anomaly in Vestibule Epsilon, whose shadow was found to persist in the absence of any object capable of casting it. The Librarian cartographers of the Administrative Spire endorsed the Residual Theory for that shadow's provenance, holding that it was the remainder of some earlier casting, and the endorsement created an administrative problem: a remainder, once ruled to exist, requires a custodian. By Third Concordance, Annex 2, custody of such remainders was assigned to "an officer of the shadow-line, sworn to answer for what is there and to record when it is not." The first Librarian-in-Shadow, a certain Marn of the ninth gallery whose other appointments are not recorded, took the oath in the winter of 604 and served eleven years before requesting transfer to the Clerks of the Sundial, citing the light.

Appointment and the oath of the absent

Candidates are drawn from the Clerks of the Sundial and from the shadow-line of the Shadow Catalogues, and are examined viva voce before two scrutineers, at least one of whom must have signed a finding of Shadow Dissonance in the preceding decade. The examination consists almost entirely of questions the candidate is not expected to answer; the scrutineers assess the candidate's composure in the presence of a question that must remain open. The oath of appointment is taken facing away from the specimen of record. It is prohibited to take the oath at noon.

The oath binds the officer to three undertakings, chief among them the maintenance of the Shadow Annex inventory under the procedural mandates of the Shadow Catalogues, and the annual confirmation that no Shadow Without Object in custody has quietly acquired an object. The third undertaking — to visit every shadow for which the officer is responsible, at least once in each term of office, and to record the visit even where the visit could not be completed — is the source of most of the office's recorded difficulties.

Duties and the Ledger of Empty Visits

The Librarian-in-Shadow keeps the Ledger of Empty Visits, in which a visit to an unattributable shadow is recorded as having been made to nothing, in a place, on a date. Entries are countersigned by a second officer who was not present. The Ledger is regarded by some as the office's central instrument and by others as evidence of its confusion; both positions are argued in the annotations to Tenth Concordance, clause 6, and neither has prevailed.

The officer is further required to determine, in borderline cases, whether a specimen is an Attributed Shadow exhibiting the characteristics of a Root Shadow, and to act on the transition before it is complete, as the Shadow Catalogues direct. Librarian-Scrutineer Aris, whose On the Nature of Appeal is the standard authority on measuring the shadow of a questioned absence, served two terms as Librarian-in-Shadow and complained in a marginal note of 714 that the office "asks a man to watch a door and to be certain, by watching, that there is no door." The note is preserved in the Shadow Annex reading room and is cited in most subsequent appeals.

The Hollow Term and the Conventicle of Seven

The office's most contested episode is the Hollow Term (869–881), during which the Librarian-in-Shadow then serving, Ellun of the third gallery, declined to confirm the custody of certain shadows on the ground that they had been misnumbered and were therefore not the shadows entrusted to her. The resulting dispute went to the Conventicle of Seven, which sat for four years and produced the finding, much annotated, that a shadow may be correctly numbered and incorrectly held. Ellun was upheld in part and rebuked in part, and the vacancy on the rolls dates from her retirement. The post has not been filled; the Administrative Spire maintains that the duties are being discharged by the office's remaining staff, and the Ledger of Empty Visits continues to be signed.

Relationship to the Inquest

The Librarian-in-Shadow gave evidence at the Inquest of the Librarians' Shadow and was the officer who formally classified the photic anomaly before the Inquest as a Root Shadow. The Inquest's subsequent binding precedents for Shadow Dissonance measurement in non-objective cases have since governed the office's method, and the officer applies The Ninety-Degree Shadow Rule to every new finding before entering it, whatever the geometry of the specimen, because the Rule is the only test that has never been successfully appealed. In one matter, involving the Straw's Shadow and its relocation to the Shadow Annex following Incident Report 88-Gamma, the officer's reading of the Rule was disputed by the Inquest and upheld, narrowly, on the ground that the Rule had been applied first.

Grades of custody

The office recognises three grades of shadow under its hand, corresponding to the grades of Memory Shadow set out in the Shadow Catalogues: Static Impression, held in ordinary custody and inspected annually; Cyclic Echo, held in the Shadow Annex and inspected on each recurrence; and Latent Resonance, held under seal and inspected only by the Librarian-in-Shadow in person, at an hour agreed in advance with the Clerks of the Sundial. A shadow in the third grade is not to be addressed by name.