Librarian-Scribe Anselm

Librarian-Scribe Anselm is the collective designation under which the Tower Archives files all correspondence, annotations, and minor instruments bearing the signature "Anselm" and a grade of scribe, where no fuller name is given. The designation is administrative rather than biographical. It is maintained because at least four distinct individuals are believed to have written under it, and because the Archives have never been able to establish which of them is responsible for any given document.

Use of the bare designation is restricted to catalogue clerks of the seventh grade and above. In practice it is invoked most often by the Office of Attributions, which inherited the file in 14-Δ after the retirement of the clerk who had kept it privately for thirty-one years.

Composition of the file

The Anselm file at present holds 2,604 items. Of these, 1,911 are signed "Anselm, Scribe" without further qualification; 402 carry the addition of a floor number; the remaining 291 are unsigned but were assigned to the file on the strength of handwriting, ink, or the recurrence of a distinctive loop in the letter g. The loop has since been found in the work of no fewer than nine scribes, and the handwriting criterion is no longer applied at first instance.

The file's holdings include the following instruments, in order of accession:

• An annotation to Clause 31 of the Fifth Concordance, dated 14-Δ 6.
• Five returns from the storehouse ledgers of Librarian-Scribe Elara Vex, all countersigned.
• A post-incident analysis of the Sentient Scribe (Model IV) following the 4f7q22b event.
• Two drafts of a petition to the Concordance Registry concerning the Mending Protocol.

Relation to named Anselms

The greatest part of the file's difficulty is nomenclatural. Librarian-Scribe Anselm the Circumspect is the best documented of the possible authors, and the bulk of scholarship assigns the file to him by default. That assignment is insecure. Librarian-Proctor Anselm shares the name, held a different grade, and worked from a different stairwell; the two are frequently confused, and a substantial minority of the file may belong to the Proctor.

The School of the Unnamed Scribe has argued since 14-Δ 19 that the confusion is structural rather than clerical — that the Archives, having only one slot in its forms for a scribe named Anselm, pressed every such scribe into it. The School's position is set out in its Memorandum on Nominal Crowding, which the Registry has twice declined to file on the ground that it is not a memorandum but a complaint.

"Where a form admits one Anselm, the Archives will receive one Anselm, however many Anselms present themselves."

— Memorandum on Nominal Crowding, §2

The 14-Δ 22 collation

In the winter of 14-Δ 22, a collation of the file was undertaken on the fourth gallery of the Aperture Stacks by a clerk of the Office of Attributions, one Halvden the Younger, who has left no other record. Halvden sorted the items into three piles by presumed author and then, finding the piles unequal to the task, sorted them again by ink. The second sort produced a fourth pile, which he labelled provisionally and never revisited. The label survives in the file as "Anselm, possibly not."

The Office has since ruled that the phrase is not a valid attribution and may not be cited in any instrument above the third grade. Clerks continue to cite it. A survey of 14-Δ 34 found it in eleven separate returns, in one case as the sole authority for a territorial restriction.

Contested attribution

Two positions dominate. The first, maintained by the Office of Attributions and taught in the scribal curriculum, holds that the designation refers to a single hand and that the appearance of multiplicity arises from copying errors in later recensions. The second, associated with the School of the Unnamed Scribe and supported by Librarian-Scribe Valerius, holds that the designation conceals at least four hands and that the Archives have preserved the ambiguity deliberately, as a form of insurance.

The dispute turns on the elevation of the Mending Protocol to a universal Concordance. One of the file's two drafts bears a marginal note in the looped hand claiming priority; the other bears nothing. Librarian-Scribe Anselm the Circumspect is widely credited with the elevation, though the attribution is contested, and the present file can neither confirm nor exclude him. The Registry has not ruled. Its stated position, recorded in Registry Marginalia, Volume XII, is that it will rule when the two drafts agree.

Access and handling

The Anselm file may be consulted on written application countersigned by a Librarian of the fifth grade. Items are issued one at a time and must not be collated in the reading room; the fourth gallery has been closed to collation since 14-Δ 22. Scribes are reminded that the file is not to be re-sorted, and that the pile labelled "Anselm, possibly not" is to be kept separate and in its present order.