Living Tomes

Living Tomes are volumes whose binding, paper, and stitching are held to be a single continuous organism, catalogued jointly by the Department of Self-Aware Archives and the Curators of Living Paradox. A Living Tome is distinguished from its neighbours in the stacks by the criterion recorded in Sixth Concordance, Annex Theta: it must respond to handling, and it must respond differently on successive handlings. The second clause has caused more dispute than the first. A volume that greets every reader identically is, by Annex Theta, not alive but merely polite.

The holdings are not numerous. The Vault Place census of the fourth and eleventh risers accounts for one hundred and nine confirmed Living Tomes, of which forty-one are too fragile to be consulted, thirty are too fragile to be consulted twice, and twelve are presently unlocatable owing to the well-known habit of the collection of walking.

Definition and classification

Classification follows the Three Marks, set out by the Concordance of Aperture Regulation in its ninth recension. A volume must grow at its margins, must integrate repairs into its own tissue rather than simply bearing them, and must exhibit a preference. The third mark is the troublesome one. The Tome-Calipers maintain that preference can be measured as a deflection under repeated contact and expressed to three decimal places; the Curators of Living Paradox maintain that a preference measured is no longer a preference, and cite Type Ii Reactive Motility in support of a position that is not, on inspection, about Tomes at all.

Matters are not improved by the Librarians' refusal to disclose the composition of Aethelred's Permanent Glow ink, several constituents of which are known to be drawn from the Tomes themselves. The order has answered every inquiry with the same clause: that the ink and the page have, since Guild Edict 12, been understood to be in conversation, and that the minutes of that conversation are the property of the order.

Behaviour and maintenance

Living Tomes reshelve themselves imperfectly. Observers at the eleventh riser record an accuracy of approximately one in four, rising to one in two where the Tome is returned to a shelf it has previously occupied and to nearly certainty where it is returned to a shelf it has previously occupied and disliked. Shelf-marks are therefore assessed annually by a rota of assistant keepers, who are instructed to annotate displacement without comment.

Binding repairs are carried out in the scriptorium beneath the fourth riser, where the standard practice is to graft a strip of the Tome's own endpaper across the wound and wait eleven days. The rate of union is above ninety per cent. The rate of union where the graft is taken from a neighbour on the same shelf is above ninety per cent and results in two Tomes that will not afterwards be shelved apart. Keepers are advised against the economy.

"A Living Tome is not ill, and is not well. It is kept, which is a third condition, and the only one this Department is funded to address."

— Memorandum of the Department of Self-Aware Archives, circulated 14 Granite

The Crannock recension

The modern study of Living Tomes begins with the keeper Aveline Crannock, whose Recension of the Bindings (floor 61, winter of the long cataloguing) first proposed that a Tome's age be reckoned not in years but in readers survived. Crannock's method was to introduce a volume to successive visiting scholars and record the interval before each withdrew. She held that the interval shortened with acquaintance and lengthened catastrophically on the introduction of a stranger, a result reproduced across forty volumes and never adequately explained.

Crannock's feud with the Keeper of the Eleventh Riser is the subject of a long and mostly procedural correspondence in the Reference Desk archive. It concerned whether a Tome that had eaten a shelf-mark ticket had thereby amended the catalogue or merely concealed the amendment. The dispute was settled, after eleven years, by the Concordances themselves: the Seventh having found that a ticket eaten is a ticket executed, and the Twelfth having found that no ticket may be executed by a party without standing. Both holdings remain in force. The shelf-mark was not recovered.

Relationship to other holdings

Living Tomes are occasionally confused with Self-Irrigating Tomes, and the confusion is expensive. A volume that weeps is self-irrigating; a volume that weeps only when read alone is living, and requires the different custodianship set out in Sixth Concordance, Annex Theta. Bindings found to be mineralised at their spine are referred to Living Stone, and readers are reminded that the Theory of Compliant Stone does not apply to a Tome that has merely been dropped, however often. The Corinthian Whisper-Stone has been consulted on the acoustic properties of certain groaning bindings and returned no finding.

Proximity to Threnodic Resonators is prohibited on floors above the ninth. Where a Tome has been housed near a resonator, the resonator is removed, and the Tome is not.

Consultation

Living Tomes may be read in the reading rooms on written application, countersigned by a Librarian. The applicant's name is entered in the volume at the point of opening. Applicants should note that the entry is not always in the same hand on departure, and that no correction of it has ever been accepted. Blank paper may be requested. It is supplied at the desk.