Reconstructed Vellum

Reconstructed Vellum is the sealed documentary stock produced by the Reconstructionist Guild through Harmonic Reintegration, and the only material recognised by the Returns Desk as a valid vehicle for texts recovered from damaged or suppressed originals. It is not, strictly speaking, vellum. The Conservatory declines to say what it is, though it is handled by the Vellum & Ink Conservatory under the same instruments as Vellum Grade 4 and is stored, for reasons of register rather than material, among the lower holdings of the Vellum Galleries.

Every sheet emerges from Reintegration bearing the Guild's sigil, a double spiral struck in cold seal across the lower margin. A wrapper so sealed is held to certify that the text within is the closest recoverable rendering of a document that no longer exists in any other form.

Composition and sealing

The process is not fully published. What the Guild has released, under clause 6 of Seventh Concordance and its later amendment, describes only the sequence of stages: extraction, harmonic alignment, recension, and seal. The alignment stage is the only one witnessed by an officer outside the Guild, and that officer is required to be blindfolded throughout. The resulting stock has a faint horizontal grain visible when held to a lamp, which conservators use to distinguish it from Standard Librarian-issue Vellum without breaking the seal.

Reconstructed Vellum is graded in three weights — draft, depositional, and terminal — though the distinction concerns only the depth of the seal impression and the thickness of the wrapper, never the text. Terminal sheets are nearly impossible to open without destroying the sigil, which is the intention. Once unsealed, a reconstructed document reverts to ordinary evidence and can be disputed like anything else.

Use at the Returns Desk

Documents arriving from Harmonic Reintegration are presented at the Returns Desk with their Reconstructed Vellum wrapper intact, and the Desk will not accept a sheet whose seal has been cracked in transit. This rule has been tested. In the winter of 3312 a returning party from the twelfth landing handed over fourteen terminal sheets whose wrappers had been opened for inspection at an intermediate floor. The Desk referred the matter to the Vellum Originals Repository, which declined jurisdiction, and then to the Vellum Descent office, which accepted the documents but recorded them as originals of unknown provenance. The resulting provenance dispute remains on the docket and is cited in no fewer than nine later returns.

For descent, Reconstructed Vellum is surrendered under Vellum Descent regulations alongside all other holdings in the Vellum Rotunda, but it is never audited for condition. The Conservatory's practice is to record the wrapper as sound and return it unopened. Questioning this produces a form.

Arguments over precedence

The central scholarly disagreement concerns whether Reconstructed Vellum constitutes an original. Fourth Concordance, Annex 2, holds that "a text restored by harmonic means is original from the moment of sealing, and prior versions are thereby void" — a position the Guild favours and has never had to defend, since void prior versions are difficult to produce. Against this, Ninth Concordance records in its preamble that "no reconstructed sheet may stand as original where an unreconstructed original is known to survive," which would subordinate the entire stock to the holdings of the Vellum of Permanence and the Vellum of Perpetual Claritude. The two annexes have never been reconciled. The Reconstructionist Guild observes Fourth, the Central Vellum Repository observes Ninth, and the Vellum Stacks observe whichever was cited most recently on the floor in question.

A minority position, advanced by the archivist Marrow Vess in a memorandum of 3318, argues that Reconstructed Vellum is neither original nor copy but a third category the Tower has no word for, and that the Concordances are therefore not in conflict but simply silent. Vess's memorandum was returned to her with the note "unsupported."

Provenance after the Great Audit

The stock's reputation is inseparable from the Great Audit, during which original records were purged on a scale that left many floors with no unreconstructed text at all. Reconstruction became, in effect, the only means of retaining a document, and reconstructed provenance chains now support a substantial fraction of the archive. This has produced the recurring difficulty known as chain-grafting, in which a reconstructed sheet is used to authenticate the reconstruction of a second sheet, which is in turn cited as the source of the first. The Reconstructionist Guild maintains that harmonic alignment prevents circularity. Recursive Loopbacks are catalogued on the assumption that it does not.

"Where a wrapper's seal is found to authenticate no prior wrapper, the sheet is to be entered as terminal and the matter left alone."

— Eleventh Concordance, Annex 5, clause 3

Known losses and handling

Reconstructed Vellum takes ink poorly and lamp smoke badly. The Dry Recension of the Scriptorium Supply Ledgers, volumes 88–94, was struck in 3204 precisely because water damage had rendered the wrappers unreadable while leaving the texts intact — an inversion that the Conservatory still cites when declining to move the stock to drier floors. A survey conducted during the 44th Vellum Descent found that of the terminal sheets held in the lower galleries, one in six had a seal impression too shallow to verify. The survey's recommendation was to verify them less often.

Sheets may be consulted in the Vellum & Ink Conservatory reading rooms on presentation of a valid seat, but they may not be carried above Floor 8,047 without a countersignature, and may not be carried above Floor 9,000 at all. The rule exists because of the Vellum Descent incident of 3307, which the Tower does not discuss and which is filed under the same heading as everything else.