Procedural Manuals

The Procedural Manuals are the operative instructional texts of the Tower, distinguished from the Concordances by function and from Guild Manuals by scope. Where a Concordance governs, a Procedural Manual instructs: it sets out, step by step and in the order the steps must be taken, how a task is to be performed, by whom, in what room, and on whose authority. The distinction is maintained by the Order of Registrars General, which has held since the Ninth Concordance that a Procedural Manual is any text a clerk may consult while standing up.

Estimates of the total number of current Procedural Manuals vary widely. The Bureau of Instructional Coherence reported 41,300 in its census of Floor 208, while the more conservative Index of Materialized Ordinance counts only those bearing a sealed cover and puts the figure nearer 12,000. The discrepancy is generally attributed to Procedural Leakage from adjacent floors and is not expected to be resolved.

Form and structure

A Procedural Manual is composed of numbered sections, of which the first six are usually administrative. Section 7 is reserved for operations and is the section most often amended, excised, or found to be missing. The procedural manuals of the Librarians contain a Section 7.4 concerning the handling of documents that have not yet been written; its text is reproduced in no other manual and is said to vary between printings. Section 7.3 of the Chroniclers' procedural manuals details the process of synthesizing Translumine, a substance whose properties are described only in manuals that presuppose the reader has already made it.

Language usage is not left to the compiler. The Lexicon of Conditional Phrases registers approximately 14,287 approved constructions, and the Fourteenth Concordance mandates that procedural manuals for inventorying inverted subjects be written in a passive-aggressive voice. Manuals for other classes of subject are permitted an ordinary register, though the Bureau of Instructional Coherence recommends the subjunctive.

Circulation and duplication

Manuals do not circulate freely. A manual held by a chartered guild may be consulted by members of that guild, by Licensed Porters carrying a valid slip, and by any clerk who has been named in the manual's own Section 2. The last provision has produced a class of manuals that name no one and cannot therefore be read. Manual Porterage — the physical conveyance of manuals between floors — is a licensed trade, and the movement of a single volume from Floor 811 to the scriptoria of the Sultanate of the Silent Stair has been the subject of four separate recensions since the Great Recalibration.

Copies proliferate where originals are withheld. The Self-Referential Archive was found in the winter of the year recorded as Archive Winter 4 to contain the procedural manuals of the Librarians' Guild filed among manuals that referenced them, which referenced the filing. Palimpsests are common; the Department of Applied Metaphysics holds that incubation periods for conceptual seeds are highly variable and appear to correlate with the frequency of citation in procedural manuals, which has made citation itself a contested act.

Disputes of authority

The principal scholarly disagreement concerns whether a Procedural Manual may create an obligation not already established by a Concordance. The Sixth Concordance holds that it may not, and that a manual instructing an unlawful act is void in its instructions and merely descriptive elsewhere. The Eleventh Concordance, Annex 2, holds the opposite: that a manual in continuous use for three generations acquires the force of the practice it describes. Both are cited constantly and neither has been withdrawn.

"Where two manuals instruct differently, the older is followed until the newer is older."

— Report on Procedural Inertia, Chapter 9

The dispute has practical consequences. In the matter of the Clerk Adversaria Vell, a junior registrar of Floor 208 who revised her office's manual to omit a step she had never seen performed, the Court of Instructional Appeal found that the omitted step had nonetheless been performed, by her, on eleven occasions after the revision. Vell maintained that the manual had instructed her and the manual no longer did. The Court held that the manual had instructed her and the omission of the instruction was itself an instruction, and fined her the cost of the eleven steps. She remains in post.

Storage and decay

Manuals are held on the floor of the body that compiled them, except where that body has been placed in Administrative Stasis, in which case the manuals are archived in a Stasis Folio and may be consulted only by appointment. The folios for the Realized Absence Guild, whose manuals refer throughout to Silas the Unseen, are the most frequently requested in the Tower and the least frequently granted.

Decay is chiefly procedural rather than physical. Procedural Nostalgia causes a manual to accumulate instructions for equipment no longer in service; Procedural Stream carries single steps between unrelated manuals, where they attach to whatever section they find. Procedural Shoring is the practice of inserting a manual between two defective ones to prevent the defect from spreading, and is prohibited on Floor 811, where the shelves are load-bearing. A manual found to be in error is not corrected but superseded, and the superseded edition is retained.

Inventory

The following were entered in the register of the Bureau of Instructional Coherence in the last complete survey, with the caveat that the survey was conducted on Floor 208 only and that two of the entries were later found to be the same manual, differently bound.

• The Index of Materialized Ordinance, sealed cover, 1,411 sections, compiler unknown.
• Shadow Catalogues, seven volumes, one of which describes photic phenomena that have not been observed.
• Taxonomic protocols, unbound, pagination disputed.
• Procedural Anomaly Validation, current edition, spine repaired twice.
• Manual of the Clockwork Parliament, no author, no date, no Section 7.