Master Copy

Definition and standing

The Master Copy is the designation given to that copy of a document which, under the concordarial doctrine of primacy, is held to be the document itself. All other copies — the Archive Copy, the Redactions Copy, working transcripts, reading copies, and the loose sheets found in stairwells — are understood as instances of or derivative from the Master Copy, irrespective of their age, material quality, or legibility. The designation is not inherent to any physical object and attaches only by act of an office empowered to confer it.

The Tower holds approximately 11,400 documents to which the designation has been conferred at some point, of which an estimated 6,900 retain it. The remaining 4,500 are the subject of what the Provenance Office terms "attribution drift" — a condition in which two or more copies each present a plausible claim, sometimes across several floors and centuries. The doctrine of primacy does not resolve such cases; it merely postpones them.

Conferral and revocation

Conferral rests with the office named in the relevant Concordance, and historically the practice has been irregular. In some districts the Provenance Master confers the designation upon receipt; in others a full assembly of the Binders' Consortium is required; in a small number of cases, the designation is simply asserted in the text of a later document and takes effect retroactively. Revocation, by contrast, is uniformly difficult. The procedure requires the simultaneous agreement of the conferring office and the office that originally conferred, and where these offices have been merged, abolished, or renamed — as several have — the requirement has no identified addressee.

The most frequently cited revocation is that of the fourth copy of the Vellum Original of the Third Concordance, struck from the register in 3,911 after it was found to be a better copy than the one it displaced. The reinstatement petition, filed the following winter, has not been adjudicated.

The material question

Whether the Master Copy must be a singular physical object or may exist as a designated reading is a matter of long disagreement. The reading favoured by the scriptoria holds that the Master Copy is a material thing: inked, bound, weighed, and stored, with its dimensions recorded in the relevant ledger. The reading favoured by the verification offices holds that the Master Copy is a status conferred upon whichever exemplar currently satisfies the textual standard, and that a copy superior in every measurable respect supersedes the incumbent regardless of the incumbent's physical condition.

The two readings were reconciled, on paper, by Concordance 12 and its non-amendable Clause 19, which provides that the Master Copy is "that copy so designated, and no other, whether or not it be the better." Critics have noted that this settles the question only by declining to answer it. The Provenance Master has on three occasions ruled that the clause applies prospectively, and on two occasions that it does not.

Custody and storage

Custody varies widely by document. Some Master Copies are held under hermetic seal on specific floors — as with the master copy of the Master Survey of Unrealized Architectonics on Floor 7,301. Others are held in annexes by their custodial order, as with the master copy of the Edict of Restricted Substances in the Restricted Materials Annex. A small number are held personally by named Librarians, and the register of these holdings is itself a document whose own status as a Master Copy is contested.

Access is governed by whatever rule attaches to the underlying document. In general, inspection of a Master Copy is permitted only in the presence of the custodial clerk, and only after a request has been entered in the Master Log and a corresponding entry made in the standing register of entries. Visitors are reminded that gloves are provided at the door and that the shelf is not to be leaned against.

Notable instances

The following documents are among the most frequently cited Master Copies in concordarial disputes:

• The Kettleman Copy, whose status as a Master Copy of its underlying text has been affirmed, revoked, and affirmed again across four recensions.
• The Vellum Original of Clause VII, regarded as the master copy of that clause and rarely opened.
• The Master Index, into which one copy of each submission to the Index of Irreconcilables is placed.
• The reported master copy of the Biographical Register, held at the Central Wall-Register.
• The surviving copy of the first recension of the Master Illumination Schedule, held within the Provenance Office itself.

Unresolved matters

The Tower has never produced a complete and agreed inventory of its Master Copies. Two such inventories exist — the Second Inventory of Master Copies compiled in 2,740 and the Revised Standing Inventory of 4,102 — and they disagree on 1,880 entries. Neither has been formally superseded. The Provenance Office maintains that the discrepancy is clerical and narrowing, though no third inventory has been commissioned.

The relationship between the Master Copy and the Master Copy of Clause 19 deserves particular note. The latter is, by the terms of Concordance 12, non-amendable and final; it is itself a Master Copy in the fullest sense, and access to it is the central object of the Biennial Verification, granted on no other occasion. That such a document should be both the exception and the exemplar of the doctrine has not gone unremarked upon.

"The Master Copy is that which is copied; that which is copied is not thereby made master. The designation, in short, precedes the copying and survives it."

— Provenance Master Kael, commentary on Clause 19