Maintenance Codices

Definition and scope

The Maintenance Codices are the standing record of every physical intervention undertaken within the Tower's fabric since the ratification of the Concordance 11 recension. They comprise 3,041 bound volumes, shelved on Floor 168 in the north stack, and they document repairs, replacements, repointing, reseating, and the occasional wholesale rebuilding of stairs, landings, doors, sluices, chutes, and shutter-runs. A maintenance act not entered in the Codices is held, under Clause 7.3 of the Administrative Codices, to have not occurred; a maintenance act entered twice is held to have occurred twice.

The Codices are maintained by the Office of Sundry Repairs, which reports to no Librarian in particular and has never been audited. Entries are made in a single hand at a time, in iron gall ink, on leaves that are pre-numbered but not pre-dated. The dating of an entry is therefore taken from the leaf's position in the volume rather than from any statement within the entry itself, a convention that has produced the long-standing disagreement described below.

Contents and format

Each volume covers an indeterminate span of work, normally between forty and six hundred entries. The standard entry records four things: the locus (floor, stair, or fixture), the defect observed, the material consumed, and the name of the attending hand. Signatures are frequently illegible. Where a hand is illegible the scribe records a mark, and where a mark is also illegible the scribe records the word attended, which discharges the entry without attributing it to anyone.

Material consumption is recorded by unit and never by weight. A quantity of lime mortar is entered as "loaders," a quantity of iron as "pieces," and a quantity of glass as "lights." No conversion table exists, and the Office of Sundry Repairs has declined repeatedly to produce one on the grounds that a conversion table would constitute a separate record and would therefore require its own Codex.

The Two-Entry Question

The principal scholarly dispute concerns entries that appear twice under different dates. Lysander the Circumspect, in the Marginalia Codices, argued that a doubled entry signifies a repair performed twice and therefore a defect that returned, which would make the Codices a record of failure rather than of work. The Office of Sundry Repairs holds the contrary view: a doubled entry signifies that the leaf was misfiled, and that the repair occurred once. Concordance 11 supports neither position explicitly.

The question is not academic. Floor 71's sluice-gate is recorded as reseated in volumes 412 and 413, nineteen leaves apart, with two different attending hands named. If the Office is correct, one of those hands performed no work and should not have been paid; if Lysander is correct, the gate was reseated twice and the second reseating consumed iron that had already been consumed. The Standing Precedents held on Floor 712 contain a ruling on a related matter, but its applicability is contested.

"A leaf is a leaf before it is a date. Let the order of the leaves stand, and let the argument stand with them."

— Office of Sundry Repairs, marginal note to volume 887

Relation to the Provisional Ledgers

Under provisional governance, entries touching floors or fixtures of uncertain standing are transcribed into the Provisional Ledgers before being admitted to the Maintenance Codices. This intermediate step has been the source of considerable delay: a stair repaired in Y148 SCE was transcribed, held, returned for clarification, re-transcribed, and finally admitted nine years later, by which time the stair had been repaired twice more without any of the three repairs being separately entered.

The transcription process is governed by the Grand Unified Ledger conventions where they apply and by the Vex Ledgers conventions where they do not, which is to say: the conventions are unsettled. Attempts to harmonise the two systems produced the Annex Sigma concordance of terms, now itself superseded.

Visiting and consultation

The north stack is open to consultation on the second and fifth days of each ten-day period. Readers may handle any volume except those still in active use, which are marked with a cord. Loose leaves may not be removed from the room; a reader who requires a passage reproduced may apply to the attending scribe, who will copy it, usually within a season.

See also

• Archive Stack
• Manual Porterage
• Class C
• Manuscript Ecosystem
• Theorist Kaelen
• The Twin Ledgers
• Hall of Precedents