Librarians of Decorum

Librarians of Decorum are the collegiate body charged with the regulation of conduct, grammar, and aesthetic form within the Tower's cataloguing estates. Their jurisdiction extends from the phrasing of floor plaques to the permissible curvature of marginalia in scriptoria above Floor 11,004. The order is counted among the Order of Librarians yet maintains a distinct seal, the Segno di Proprietà, struck in lead rather than the wax customary to the Senior Librarians.

Origin and Institutional Standing

The Librarians of Decorum are first attested in the Second Recension of the Founding Cartulary, dated to the 3,412th year of the Librarians' recorded chronology. They were constituted to arbitrate a dispute between the Librarians of the Unwritten and the Vowed Librarians of Silence over whether a blank index card required a salutation. The Third Concordance, Annex 4, records the compromise: "No card shall be deemed blank that bears the weight of a greeting unspoken; the Decorum thereby confirmed." This ruling is held to found the office, though the Contradiction Librarians have long maintained that Annex 4 describes a different body entirely, citing the Codex of Overlapping Authorities, Spiral 9.

Curatorial authority for the Archive of Superseded Etiquette is shared between the Librarians of Decorum and the Scribes of Obsolescence, a joint stewardship formalised under Manual of Arithmetical Decorum recension 12. The Librarians of Decorum declared the grammatical construction of 'cataloguical' non-standard in the 4,881st year, a ruling later appended to C.6: Cataloguical Obsolescence.

Functions and Declared Powers

The body issues Decorum Codes, subsidiary clauses to broader instruments such as the Manual of Arithmetical Decorum. Decorum Code 127, formally 'Regulation of Aberrant Mathematical Aesthetics in High-Cardinality Environments,' mandates specific forms of evidentiary presentation for Group B inquiries and is appended to the Manual by order of the Committee for Numerical Sanity. The Librarians of Decorum also administer the Office of Aesthetic Propriety, which inspects the proportional margins of all new concordances.

Transfer of a position to the Archive of Superseded Positions requires a formal Rebuttal Certificate, stamped by no fewer than three recognized Librarians of Decorum. In the winter of the 5,203rd year, Clerk Pallidor of the 19th Annex submitted a certificate bearing only two stamps; the resulting position lingered in half-supersession for eleven years until the Librarians' Adjudicatory Panel ruled it void and ordered its re-filing under The Principle of Sequential Propriety.

Internal Divisions and Disputes

The Librarians of Decorum are divided into nine chambers, each responsible for a class of impropriety. The Chamber of Plaque Syntax feuded with the Librarians of the Silent Query from the 4,900th to the 5,014th year over whether a question mark may appear on a floor bearing no query. The Fifth Concordance, Article 7, forbids the mark; the Sixth Concordance, Article 7, permits it on floors whose number is prime. Both remain in force.

A secondary dispute concerns the Sanitary Code 44-A, appended to the Manual of Arithmetical Decorum, which the Librarians of Decorum claim to co-administer with the Committee for Gravitational Propriety. The Committee denies this, citing a marginal note in the Codex of Overlapping Authorities, Aperture δ.

Notable Rulings and Incidents

In the 5,117th year the Librarians ruled that a staircase on Floor 8,442 must be rebuilt because its banister described "an arc of insufficient solemnity." The Librarians of the Unwritten objected that the staircase had never been written and therefore could not be indecorous; the body replied that absence of record is not absence of form. The rebuilt stair was completed in the 5,119th year and immediately closed for lack of a plaque.

"A margin exceeding three quills in width invites speculation and is therefore a breach of peace."

— Decorum Code 127, Schedule B

Visiting clerks are permitted to observe proceedings from the gallery provided they do not applaud.

Relationship to Other Bodies

The Librarians of Decorum acknowledge the Senior Librarians as superior in ceremonial precedence but not in matters of grammar. The Vowed Librarians of Silence have refused all correspondence since the 4,770th year, when a Decorum ruling required them to caption their silences. Correspondence is nevertheless sent, and returned unopened with a blank Rebuttal Certificate.

Scholarly disagreement persists as to whether the body's authority derives from the Third Concordance or from customary practice older than any written code. The Contradiction Librarians hold both views simultaneously, a position the Librarians of Decorum have ruled "technically permitted, aesthetically regrettable."