Marlo of the Silent Stacks

Marlo of the Silent Stacks is the conventional designation given by the Custodians of the Silent Stacks to a commentarial hand active, on the dating accepted by the Silent College, between Year 447 and Year 461 of the 23rd Spiral, and known to the archive exclusively through annotations entered in the margins of holdings housed in The Silent Stacks. The designation is a convenience, not a name on a title page: no work bears the name Marlo, and no Librarian has ever claimed to know which Marlo is meant.

The difficulty is compounded by the archive's existing Marlo holdings. Readers consulting this page are directed to Marlo, which records at least four distinct figures bearing that name: the founder of the Somnialist School in Year 341; the scribe of the Literalist School and Commentator active in the latter half of the 23rd Spiral; the Clerk whose initiating memorandum produced the Cessationist School; and the Senior Archivist and former Literalist who articulated a key doctrine of the Potentialist School. Marlo of the Silent Stacks is none of these, or is one of them writing under conditions that defeated identification — a question the Custodians have resolved by ruling, formally, in Concordance 47, Annex 6, that "the hand shall be catalogued and the body permitted to remain unassigned."

The hand and its habits

The annotations themselves are consistent to a degree that makes the problem worse. Marlo of the Silent Stacks wrote in a narrow upright secretary hand, in a brown iron-gall ink that has foxed most of the pages it touches, and under three recurring habits. He corrected silently — striking a scribal error and supplying the correction without note or mark. He dated nothing. And he wrote in the second person, addressing not the reader but the compiler, so that the margins fill with instructions to a person who had already finished the work: you have taken the fourth recension for the third; inquire at the ninth desk; they will not have it.

He was also, by the reckoning of The Veiled Stacks: A Procedural Guide, the only Commentator of the period whose marginalia appear in the West Silent Wing and in Annex Ψ on the same folios — that is, attached to texts that are elsewhere recorded as separate holdings on separate floors. The Guide's authors conclude, with some reluctance, that "the hand travelled, or the folios did; the archive has found it impossible to establish which, and had begun to find the question less interesting than the cost of pursuing it."

The Winter Cessation

The episode for which Marlo of the Silent Stacks is chiefly cited occurred in the winter of Year 452, during the period of the Silent Concordance Breach. It is described in the Custodians' annual return for that year and, at greater length, in a marginal note Marlo appended to a bound copy of Concordance 47 now held in the Silent Cabinet.

According to the annual return, a dispute arose between the Silencing Office and the West Silent Wing over whether an annotation entered during a period of silence counted as a spoken record or a written one. The Silencing Office held that any mark made in a silent jurisdiction was an utterance and must be struck. The Wing held that a mark is a mark. The dispute reached the Senior Librarians in the eleventh week and was settled, temporarily, by impanelling two Silent Porters to carry the pages out of the acoustically sensitive zone, in a covered case, for examination elsewhere. Marlo's annotation on the affair consists of one line:

"They carried the pages out in a case large enough for a man, and returned with the case only. No one has asked about the case."

— annotation to Concordance 47, folio 61v, attributed to Marlo of the Silent Stacks

Dispute over the hand

Whether Marlo of the Silent Stacks is a distinct Commentator, or an intermittent habit of annotation shared by several scribes working in the same scriptorium, is an open dispute and one of the more bitter in the College's recent record. The Custodians of the Silent Stacks maintain the former, and have since Year 798 catalogued the annotations as the work of a single hand, largely because the alternative requires the Silent Stacks to have permitted at least six unrecorded scribes access to the same restricted folios.

The Senior Archivist Parser Elidon of the Silent Stacks argued at length against that position in the College's proceedings for Year 811, observing that the hand's corrections are "nowhere contradicted by the hand," which he considered evidence less of one writer than of a workshop in which everyone knew better than to disagree in writing. Wren of the Silent Stacks replied, in the same proceedings, that Elidon's reasoning proved too much, since it would dissolve the authorship of every commentarial tradition in the Tower. The College has not resolved the question. The First Curator of the Silent Stacks declined, in Year 812, to enter a finding, noting only that "Marlo the fourfold is already with us, and the archive has survived him."

Restrictions on consultation

The Marlo annotations are classed as restricted holdings under Concordance 47, Clause 9, which permits consultation only by readers who have first lodged a statement of the purpose for which they require the text. The statement is not read by anyone and is not retained. Readers occasionally discover that the annotation they sought is not the annotation that answers; this is recorded on the consultation slip as a class-two disappointment and requires no further action.

Physical custody of those original folios bearing the hand is transferred on consultation to the Silent Stacks, where the Sable Cabinet stands open for the purpose; readers are reminded at the door that the Cabinet is to be left open, and that the room is not to be entered while the Silent Bell is sounding. Whispering over the folios is permitted. Correcting them is not.

Selected references

Concordance 47

Annex 6 (hand not to be assigned to a body); Clause 9 (consultation); folio 61v (annotation on the case).

The Silent Stacks Excavation (890-Σ)

Excavation inventory, Floor -Ψ; records a covered case recovered empty.

Silent Cabinet

Deposition and custody records, Year 452–812.

Proceedings of The Silent College, Years 811 and 812

Elidon and Wren on the plurality of the hand.

Sequestered Stacks

Comparison of inseparable holdings; not directly bearing on the hand.