School of Literal Inventory

The School of Literal Inventory is a cataloguing body of the Tower, founded in the winter of 1147 by seven clerks of the Ninth Gallery who had been appointed to reconcile the Gallery's contents against their own written record and found the two in agreement on only forty-one of some six thousand entries. Rather than amend either the record or the cases, the clerks resolved to enumerate the discrepancy itself, entry by entry, and were still at this when the fiscal year closed. Their working paper, circulated the following spring as On the Enumeration of What Is Presently Present, is the founding document of the School, and its opening clause remains the standard definition of the discipline: "An inventory shall state what is on the shelf, and shall state it as though the shelf might be asked to confirm."

The School holds chambers in the Gallery's western annex and is, by its own count, the only school in the Tower whose holdings are stored in the same room in which they are compiled. It maintains no outreach office. It is not to be confused with the School of Manifest Inventory, which counts what can be seen, nor with the School of Literal Taxonomists, whose working party on the Ninth Gallery dispute was formed at the School's expense and has never been dissolved.

Doctrine

The School proceeds on the principle that a thing listed is a thing held, provided the listing was made by someone standing in front of it. This is a stricter rule than it sounds. Clerks are required to enumerate in the presence of the item, at arm's length, and to sign each line on the spot rather than at the end of the day. The practice derives from an incident in 1161, when a junior clerk completed a survey of the Fourth Recess from memory during a lunch interval and returned to find three of the items had been removed by parties unknown and one replaced by a hat. The hat was inventoried. The School's position, set out in the subsequent ruling, is that this was correct procedure and that the three removals were the fault of the record, not the clerk.

A subsidiary tenet, inherited from the School of Literal Adherence and developed independently by the School of Literal Inventory, distinguishes between an item's presence and its availability for counting. An item may be present and yet not countable — if it is behind glass, if it is too large to be seen whole, if it is the room in which the counting is taking place. Such items are entered on a separate schedule, the Schedule of the Presently Uncounted, which by Concordance must be bound at the front of every inventory rather than the back, so that readers encounter the absences first.

The Forty-One Entries

The forty-one entries on which the original clerks and the Ninth Gallery record agreed have been preserved as a set and are copied, at the beginning of each new inventory season, onto a single sheet of vellum kept under seal. The sheet has been recopied eleven times. On each occasion the number has been verified before copying and has been found to be forty-one, and on each occasion the recopied sheet has been checked afterwards and found to be forty-two. The additional entry is always a small brown door, and it is always listed as being on the floor below.

Successive Keepers of the Sheet have taken different positions on the extra line. The ninth Keeper, Halven Roos, struck it out in 1308 and recorded in the margin that it was "not a holding but a habit." The School declined to adopt the annotation and struck out the strike, so that the sheet now records the door, the strike through the door, and the strike through the strike. Later Keepers have left the matter alone. The door remains uncounted on the Schedule of the Presently Uncounted and has never been found, although three expeditions have gone looking and all three returned with inventories of the stairs.

Dispute with the School of Literal Recurrence

The School's long disagreement with the School of Literal Recurrence concerns whether an inventory, once compiled, may be inventoried in turn. The Recurrence position is that it may, and that the second inventory should appear as an entry in a third. The School of Literal Inventory holds that this is not enumeration but arithmetic, and that arithmetic falls outside its warrant. The dispute has been referred, in writing, nine times.

"The School does not deny that its inventories may be counted. It denies that the counting of them is an inventory. A list of lists is a list; a list of lists of lists is a complaint."

— School of Literal Recurrence, Reply to the Ninth Referral, clause 6

The School of Literal Interpretation has never accepted either position as evidence, and the School of Literal Indexing maintains a separate register of the referrals in which the parties are listed alphabetically rather than by seniority, a decision the School of Literal Inventory has protested on the grounds that it makes the School appear to begin with I.

Method and Objections

Clerks enumerate in pairs, one to call and one to write, and the pair exchange roles at the half-hour. This is not for accuracy but for morale. The School's own figures record that single enumeration produces inventories of equal reliability and considerably greater length, since a lone clerk will list the same object twice rather than admit to having lost their place. Working inventories are kept on slates; only fair copies are made on paper; and no entry may be transferred from slate to paper until it has been read aloud to a second clerk who was not present at the counting. The rule was introduced after the affair of the Second Recess, in which a slate was dropped and the resulting inventory recorded a corridor as having nine windows and one of them open in a room with no exterior wall.

The School permits no abbreviation in the description of an object's condition, and no inference in the description of its position. An item is not "near the door" but "forty centimetres from the door, on the left as one enters, at the height of the second shelf." A reader who has followed the Ninth Gallery's inventories for any length of time will notice that the second shelf has been at the same height since 1147, and that this is the only measurement in the entire record that has never been disputed.

Practical Notes

The chambers are open to visiting clerks between the second and fifth hour after the bells, except during counting, when the door is barred from the inside and the bar is entered on the schedule. Visitors are asked to state their business in writing at the threshold and to leave their own inventories with the porter, as nothing may be brought into a room that is being counted.

Since 1493 the School has required that every completed inventory carry, on its final leaf, the signature of the clerk who counted the last item, the signature of the clerk who wrote it, and the date on which the two signatures were compared. The comparison is made immediately. The requirement has never once been met on the first attempt, and the School regards this as evidence of diligence rather than of its opposite.

In 1498 a visiting inspector, asked to comment on the School's methods for the Concordance on Enumeration, returned a single line: "They count what is there, and they are there when they count it." The clause was adopted without amendment, and the inspector was not invited back.