Scribes of the Upper Scriptorium

Scope of the designation

Scribes of the Upper Scriptorium is the collective designation for the salaried and stipended writing staff attached to the Upper Scriptorium, the primary annex of the Scriptorium of Damp Vells on Floor 11,247, Sub-corridor Gamma. The designation is administrative rather than honorific: it appears on payroll schedules, on the outer door-plates of Sub-corridors Gamma-1 through Gamma-9, and in the annual returns submitted to the Upper Administration. It does not, however, denote a single grade. The Scribes are divided among several functional orders, some of which predate the Scriptorium's current charter, and the boundaries between them are the source of a dispute older than any of the present incumbents.

The Scribes' operative duty is the transcription and archival stabilization of provisional amendments issued by the Upper Administration for floors 10,000 and above, and the authorized transcription of all Scriptorium Edicts. Their secondary duty — the one most often forgotten until it is overdue — is the maintenance of the concordance indices required by the Manual of Scriptorial Verification.

Composition and grades

The Scribes are conventionally listed in four grades, though the fourth is contested.

• Transcribing Scribes, who hold the routine work of amendment stabilization.
• Revising Scribes, who read against the source and note variants.
• Sealing Scribes, who apply the annex's damp-stamps and are the only grade permitted to handle vellum leaving the building.
• Silent Scribes, whose status is disputed — see below.

The first three grades are straightforward and are governed by the salary tables in Annex 7 of the Upper Register. Relations with the neighbouring orders — the Acquisition Scribes, the Master Scribes, and the Dream-Scribes — are cordial but procedurally guarded; shared duties are assigned by corridor rather than by subject, which is why the eastern bays handle all aerial survey material produced in cooperation with the Allegorists of the Upper Reaches while the western bays do not touch it at all.

The status of the Silent Scribes

The fourth grade turns on whether the Silent Scribes are members of the Scriptorium's staff or merely persons who work in it. The document SI-22007-B describes them as "scribes in the full sense, whose silence is procedural and not vocational," a reading that would fold them into the payroll and the return to the Upper Administration. The Third Concordance takes a different line, referring to Silent Scribes in a clause that governs visitors and stone-cutters, which would exclude them from staff status entirely.

The dispute was argued at length during the winter of 12,189, when the Scriptorium's supply of unmarked vellum ran short and the question of who could requisition more became, briefly, a question of who counted as a Scribe. The Scribes for Auditable Process produced a reconciliation in which Silent Scribes requisition through a named Transcribing Scribe; this was accepted for practical purposes and has never been ratified. The Guild of Onomic Scribes, whose members sign their own work, have twice petitioned to be entered on the same schedule and have been refused on the grounds that the schedule is already difficult enough to read.

The self-referential archive

On 14-Δ-12,430 the Upper Scriptorium ratified the Upper Reaches Cataloguing Project and, in the same session, issued a special ruling to resolve disputes regarding self-referential archives. The ruling matters here because the Scribes' own personnel records are held in the Scriptorium they staff. Under the ruling, a Scribe may not transcribe a document in which they are named as a party, and the task passes to the nearest colleague in an adjacent corridor. In practice this has produced a slow lateral drift of signatures across Sub-corridors Gamma-1 through Gamma-9, so that the 12,407 revision of the amendment tables bears no signature from anyone who was present when it was written.

Cartographer-Scribes, who are not of the Upper Scriptorium but hold desks in the same corridor under an arrangement dating to the Central Stairwell extension, have twice claimed the benefit of the ruling on the grounds that floor plans naming their own bays are self-referential. Both claims were denied; the second denial notes that a plan is a drawing and not a document.

Relations with the Central Scriptorium

Authority over the wider scribal orders runs through the Central Scriptorium, and the Upper Scriptorium's output is definitive for administrative law in the Upper Reaches only. Where a matter touches both, a senior archivist from the Central Scriptorium reconciles the findings — an arrangement that produced, in the case of Annex Gamma-7, a reconciliation longer than either original report.

Visiting Scribes from other floors are admitted to Sub-corridor Gamma on weekdays before the third bell; wet coats are left on the rack outside Gamma-4 and not brought into the transcription bays, as the vellum takes the smell.

See also

• Guild of Ephemeral Scribes
• Floor 4022 the Silent Scriptorium
• Central Stairwell