Seventeen Identical Spoons

The Seventeen Identical Spoons are a matched service of vitreous measuring utensils held in the Reserved Implements Vault on Floor 41 and catalogued, since the recension of 1147, as a single object rather than seventeen. Each spoon is drawn from a single pour of Vitreous Silica (Floor 88), annealed under the protocols established for the Vitreous Seal, and stamped on the underside of the bowl by the oversight committee of the Glasswrights' Guild. No inspection has ever distinguished one from another by weight, capacity, tint, or ring, and the Vault's standing instruction is that the service be handled as though it were one spoon that happens to be in seventeen places.

The spoons are calibrated for the transfer of Translumine and Pensive Condensation under Annex IV, Clause 19 of the Seventh Concordance, the same instrument standard that governs Vitreous Spoons generally. Their interest to the archive is not metrological but jurisdictional: the question of whether seventeen indistinguishable spoons constitute one article, seventeen articles, or an article of a kind not otherwise provided for has been litigated, in one form or another, for three hundred years.

Origin and the pour of 1102

The service was drawn in the winter of 1102 from the fourth pour of that season, a batch the Glasswrights' Guild had already condemned as uneven in its cooling. The condemnation proved unfounded in every respect except the one that mattered. The seventeen spoons emerged identical — not similar, but identical, so that the Guild's assayers reported themselves unable to establish a master against which the remaining sixteen might be checked.

Guild practice requires a master. Without one, the committee declined to stamp the service, and the spoons entered the Tower's registers unstamped, which for a measuring implement is the equivalent of unbaptised. They remained so for forty-one years, during which they were used, by waiver, for the reconstitution of desiccated Empathetic Indexes — a duty for which Vitreous Spoons are mandated and for which, the waiver noted, exact capacity is less important than willingness.

Stamp and counter-stamp

The deadlock was broken in 1143 by a clerk of the Vault, Halven Marrow, who proposed that the committee stamp one spoon and that the other sixteen be recorded as impressions of it. The committee accepted the proposal and then, in the same session, declined to say which spoon had been stamped. The record reads only: "One of the seventeen was stamped. The stamp was observed to be present on all of them."

Marrow's grievance, preserved in his hand in the Vault's day-book, is that the resolution was later cited against him:

"I asked for one master and was given seventeen. I am told this is the same thing. It is not the same thing. I have counted."

— Halven Marrow, Day-Book of the Reserved Implements Vault, entry for 14 Frostfall 1143

The Guild has never revisited the ruling. Under current practice each spoon carries the committee's stamp and each stamp is certified as the master stamp, which is why the service is sometimes described in inventories as seventeen masters and no copies.

Dispute: one object or seventeen

The central disagreement concerns classification. The Ninth Concordance, Annex 2, holds that objects indistinguishable in every measurable respect are to be catalogued once, "lest the archive be multiplied without increase of knowledge." The Fourteenth Concordance, Annex 2, holds with equal firmness that every physically distinct article occupies a distinct place in the registers and must be entered separately, "lest the archive conceal what it holds." Both annexes are numbered 2. Both are in force.

The Bureau of Ambiguous Forms, whose speciality is the regulation of Identical Ambiguous Referents, has declined to resolve the matter, observing in its circular of 1301 that the spoons are not ambiguous — they are perfectly determinate and merely numerous — and that the Bureau's charter does not extend to arithmetic. The Chamber of Coincident Jurisprudence has taken the opposite view and claimed jurisdiction four times, on each occasion suspending its own claim pending the outcome of the previous one.

A minority reading, advanced by the archivist Sennet Vole, treats the service as a recurring instance of Homonymic Resonance on the grounds that seventeen bearers of a single designation briefly merge properties at every counting. Vole's reading has not been adopted, chiefly because the spoons do not merge; they merely fail to separate.

Incidents

In the winter of 1288 a Vault attendant, distracted, carried one spoon to the Vitreous Chrono-Plating apparatus on Floor 63 for thermal shock testing and returned with it. The count in the Vault register that evening was seventeen. The count at the apparatus was also seventeen. No spoon was found to be missing from either station, and the discrepancy — if it is one — has never been closed. The attendant was reassigned to the dry shelves and is not named in the record.

More troubling was the affair of 1362, when a visiting inspector from the Provisional Indexing Guidelines office attempted to number the service with gummed tags. The tags were applied and immediately found to be on the wrong spoons. Reapplied, they were again on the wrong spoons. The inspector withdrew, recording that "the service resists serialisation by means not presently understood," and recommended that the spoons be numbered only in the presence of a witness who had not seen them before. No such witness has been found willing since 1363.

The Seventeen Sealing Verses are sometimes proposed as a remedy, on the strength of the numeral alone. Annexure C of the Seventeen Sealing Verses concerns Procedural Recitation and has no bearing on implements; the proposal is a coincidence of counting and is refused each time it is made.

Current holding

The service remains in the Reserved Implements Vault, entered in the registers under a single catalogue number with sixteen cross-references to itself. It is lent for the reconstitution of Empathetic Indexes and for no other purpose. Borrowers sign for one spoon. The Vault issues one spoon. The return is counted, and the count is seventeen, and the entry is closed.

Visitors to Floor 41 are asked not to count the spoons aloud.