Librarians' Recorded Chronology (LRC)

The Librarians' Recorded Chronology (LRC) is the principal calendrical system employed by the order of Librarians for the dating of internal documents, the tenure of officers, and the procedural acts of the order. It is maintained independently of the Tower Standard Chronology and of every other temporal framework in The Tower, and its custody rests with the Vowed Librarians of Silence, who hold the physical ledgers at a floor they do not disclose in correspondence.

Under the LRC, years are counted from the founding of the order's first scriptorium. The present year is not stated in this entry. It is not stated in any entry.

Principles of isolation

The LRC operates under a doctrine of functional isolation. Its dates are not convertible to Tower Chronology dates, and no formula for conversion has survived scrutiny; the tables supplied by the College of Applied Chronology in its third recension were withdrawn after the Verification of Chronology found them to disagree with themselves by a margin of four days in every eleven. The LRC is likewise reset following major internal events, so that documents either side of a reset are dated by different counts which are nevertheless written identically. Clerks are instructed to read the seal, not the numeral. The seals are held separately.

Recorded dates are considered immune to retroactive alteration. This does not mean they are not altered; it means the alterations are not recorded. Ordinance 4, Annex C, promulgated in the 231st year of the LRC, is silent on the subject except to note that the year in which it was promulgated is to be regarded as fixed.

Notable years

The Gap of Unspoken Years falls between LRC Years 154 and 155. It has no stated duration. The Vowed Librarians of Silence maintain that it has none, and that the numbering is continuous; the Chronology Guild maintains that duration is continuous and the numbering is not. Neither body has consented to examine the other's ledgers.

The 127th year is contained within the 127th Cycle, a period about which the record is unusually full and unusually unhelpful. The Fifth Chronology cites the 127th Cycle twice and contradicts itself on both occasions. The Librarian Record Codex years are tabulated in the Codex itself, which is held, in accordance with long practice, in a room the Vowed Librarians describe as adjacent.

The ledgers and the redaction

The physical ledgers of the LRC are bound in grey board and weigh between eleven and fourteen pounds, depending on the humidity of the floor on which they are shelved. Their nightly self-redaction process is set out in the entry on the Ledger of Erasures. Briefly, the ledger records; the Erasures records the record; and the two are reconciled each morning by a clerk who is not permitted to speak to the clerk who performed the reconciliation the previous morning.

This prohibition is taken seriously. In the winter following the promulgation of the Harmonized Chronology, a clerk of the second scriptorium — named in the Librarians' recorded chronology as Clerk Adjutant Vell — spoke to her predecessor on the stair. The resulting exchange was recorded in the Erasures as an event with no date, and the Erasures have not reconciled cleanly since. Vell's grievance, filed against the order rather than against the clerk, is preserved unopened in the file of the Arbiter Silt and is cited in the concordance literature chiefly as an example of correct form.

Disputes and contradictions

The principal scholarly disagreement turns on whether the LRC is a chronology or a chronology about a chronology. The Standard Archive Chronology treats it as the former, and dates LRC documents by reference to LRC years; the Incident Chronology treats it as the latter, and refuses to date anything by the LRC at all on the grounds that a document dated by its own system of dating has not been dated. The Stairwell Chronology, which is short, supports neither position and is often described as the most honest of the three.

The Narrative Precedence Over Chronology ruling of the Chronology Guild settled the matter in favour of whichever party had filed most recently, which has led to the position being reconsidered approximately every second year. Ordinance 4, Annex C is the standing authority; it is also the document over which the dispute originally arose.

"Where a date is recorded twice, the second record prevails. Where it is recorded once, the date is the date of the ledger, not of the document."

— Ordinance 4, Annex C, clause 7

Use by clerks

Clerks of the order date their correspondence by LRC year, month, and the name of the scriptorium. Visitors are asked not to date anything. A date supplied by a visitor is entered in the Erasures under a separate heading and remains there until the next reset, at which point it is neither confirmed nor discarded but filed under the letter of the month in which it was offered. Clerks are reminded that the LRC has twelve months and that this has been the case since before the Gap.

Requests for a conversion table should be addressed to the Vowed Librarians of Silence, who will not answer. Requests should nonetheless be made, as the record of unanswered requests is itself a dated document.