Scribe's Iron Gall

Scribe's Iron Gall is a prepared writing fluid of the ferrous-gall family, held by the Office of Proprietary Inks as the common ancestor of every iron-gall formulation in licensed use above the Iron Archive. It is not itself proprietary. It is, rather, the reference standard against which proprietary claims are adjudicated — a distinction that has caused more litigation than the substance has caused ink.

The fluid is dark violet at decanting and blackens over roughly forty hours as its iron salts oxidise, a property first described in the West Scriptorium's measurement ledgers as "the gall's slow argument with the air." Batches are certified by specific gravity and by a timed flow test through a standard nib; the tolerance is narrow and the paperwork is not.

Composition and the question of the quill

Scribe's Iron Gall is compounded from oak gall, green vitriol, gum, and archive water, in proportions fixed under the Fourth Concordance and variously disputed since. The gum content is the perennial sticking point: the Scriptoria prefer a heavier body that sits on the surface of vellum, while the clerks of the Register of Final Deposition maintain that anything heavier than the standard will not penetrate cured hide and will therefore flake from the page within a century.

The Seventh Concordance takes the Scriptoria's side for entries in that Register, and its wording has been read by some Recorders as applying generally. The Office of Proprietary Inks has declined to endorse that reading. Its position, restated at every revision since, is that the Seventh governs deposition and nothing else, and that a general rule drawn from it would render the Iron-Gall Quill of Standard Grade 4 unsuitable for marginalia under Concordance 7,001-α, "a result no party before this Office has ever sought."

Relationship to proprietary formulations

Scribe's Iron Gall is functionally identical to the base stock of Gall of the Silent Scribe, the formulation from which the Silent College derives the ink supplied by its Annex Scriptorium. The College has never disputed the resemblance and has never conceded it either, describing the matter in its 1,142nd return as "a shared inheritance, not a derivation." The distinction matters chiefly to the Office of Proprietary Inks, which will not accept Instruments of Discretion in iron-gall of any grade and has twice rejected College instruments on the ground that the base stock was recognisably Scribe's.

The Iron Nib, whose writing point is a sliver of hardened Scribe's Glass, was designed for use with Scribe's Iron Gall and remains the only nib for which the standard batch is certified without further trial. Clerks who substitute other nibs are asked to record the substitution in the margin. Most do.

"Let no fluid be entered upon a page as proprietary which, upon evaporation to one quarter, yields the residue of the common gall."

— Office of Proprietary Inks, Standing Instruction 9

Use in marginalia and the Longhand

Marginalia under Concordance 7,001-α may be applied only with an Iron-Gall Quill of Standard Grade 4, and the fluid charged to that quill is Scribe's Iron Gall of the certified batch. The rule was tested in the winter of the archive year 4,318, when a duty clerk of the Third Order entered a note in a deposition ledger using an uncertified gall drawn from a floor cistern on the false understanding that all galls are the same gall. The entry was legible. It was also ruled inadmissible, and the entire ledger was recopied at the clerk's own expense — thirty-one leaves, in Administrative Longhand, which the Silent College supplied from its Annex Scriptorium. The clerk's grievance, filed against the cistern, was dismissed on the ground that the cistern had made no representation.

The Third Order has since required that all Logbook of Omissions entries be made with Scribe's Iron Gall, and that the batch certificate be stitched to the logbook's inner board. This is done.

Comparison with Void-Gall, and a note on handling

The resemblance between Scribe's Iron Gall and Void-Gall is close enough that the two are separated at the shelf by a red cord and a printed card. Void-Gall is a perimeter-marking formulation and is not suitable for the page; it will hold a mark on stone for a season and will eat through vellum in rather less. Clerks drawing from the wrong vessel are instructed to rinse the nib at once in archive water and report the draw. The report is not a reprimand. It is a record.

The fluid is issued in stoneware only. Glass is not accepted at the counter, whatever it previously held.

Scholarly dispute

Whether Scribe's Iron Gall is a substance or a specification remains open. The Ferrous Gall Ink school holds that the name denotes a family of interchangeable preparations meeting a published test, and points to the survival of eleven distinct regional recipes under the common certification. The Gall-Infused Archive Water school counters that only the water drawn from the Iron Archive itself produces a batch that passes the timed flow test without adjustment, and that the name therefore denotes a place as much as a fluid.

The Office has taken no position. Its seal on a batch certificate attests only that the batch is what the certificate says it is. What that is, the Office notes in the same breath, has never been within its remit.