Tower Guilds

The Tower Guilds are the aggregate body of chartered professional and trade associations recognized within the Tower's administrative fabric, distinct from the Guilds and Orders Tower which governs them and from the Nine Concordant Guilds which furnish nominations to the Board of Concordant Interpretation. The term is loose and is used inconsistently in the record: some documents employ it to mean the entirety of all chartered associations, and others to mean only those guilds whose charters antedate the Concordance of 110 Sub-Annex 3. A third usage, restricted to the Custodial Guilds and their allied Clerical Guilds, appears in the Registry of Physical Plant and nowhere else.

Colloquially the word "guild" is applied to almost any body of persons asserting jurisdiction over a technique, arithmetic, staircase, or condition of the air. This has caused difficulty. The Guild of Exactitude has twice refused to be described as a guild, on the grounds that its founding document names it a "society," and has twice been overruled.

Composition and mutual recognition

The Tower Guilds comprise, by the most conservative count, forty-one associations of recognized standing. Among these are the Guild of Structural Logicians, the Guild of Procedural Archivists, the Guild of Palimpsest Readers, the Clerical Guilds, the Custodial Guilds, and the several bodies of the Guilds of the Tower proper. Membership is inherited, examined, or purchased, depending on the guild and on whether the purchaser has a witness.

Recognition is reciprocal but not transitive. Guild A may recognize Guild B, and Guild B Guild C, without Guild A being in any way obliged to recognize Guild C — a state of affairs formalized in the Second Concordance as the Doctrine of Non-Conveyance. The result is a lattice of partial recognitions that the Architectural Cartographers' Guild has attempted to chart seven times.

"No guild shall inherit the recognition of another, nor may recognition pass through a guild in the manner of water through a filter."

— Second Concordance, Annex 9

The Question of the Charters

Precisely which guilds are "Tower Guilds" in the strict sense remains unsettled. The Third Concordance maintains that only guilds whose charters carry the seal of the Order Secundus qualify, which would exclude the six associations of the Clerical Guilds formed after the Recension of Floor 214. The Fourth Concordance reverses this, holding that recognition "inheres in the exercise of the trade" and that a seal is "a decorative confirmation only." The two have been in open contradiction since the last amendment to the Fourth, which nobody recalls ratifying and which has nonetheless been enforced.

Efforts at reconciliation have produced no fewer than four rival lists, none complete. The Inter-Guild Relations office prefers the list of the Guild of Quantifiers, which has the advantage of being countable and the disadvantage of counting itself twice.

Internal governance

The Tower Guilds are supervised in matters of charter, succession, and dispute by the Guilds and Orders Tower acting under authority delegated from the Librarian-Taxonomist's Office. Between sittings, each guild is administered by its own Master, though what a Master is depends on the guild: the Guild of Exactitude's Master is elected; the Guild of Palimpsest Readers' Master is the most recently erased member; the Custodial Guilds have no Master at all and deny the office exists, referring all enquiries to the Custodial Mandate.

Finance is partly derived from assessment and partly from a levy on the sale of guild ribbons, which has funded the erection of three thousand metres of intermediate railing. The levy was contested by the Clerical Guilds in 1442 under the Concordant Law governing internal trade, and the dispute was resolved by the issuance of a Concordance which has since been cited only in its own defence.

Notable disputes

The longest-running interguild dispute concerns the maintenance of the stair between Floors 88 and 91, claimed by both the Custodial Guilds and the Clerical Guilds. Each has catalogued the stair as its own responsibility and neither will repair it, on the grounds that the other would take the credit. The stair has remained derelict since 1387. A plaque at the landing, installed by the Guild of Procedural Archivists, records the dispute to date.

Smaller feuds are common and mostly procedural. The Guild of Palimpsest Readers and the Guild of Exactitude contest the proper handling of figures that have been altered once; the Palimpsests hold that any alteration is a reading, the Exactitudes that only the final value counts. On Floor 214 during a recataloguing, a clerk named Vess Annoise was directed by both guilds to correct the same figure in two incompatible ways and, upon recording the conflict accurately, was censured by both. Her corrected page is held at Floors 214 and 219 simultaneously and is not consulted.

Use of the term

In the ordinary speech of the Tower, "Tower Guilds" commonly refers to whichever guild is nearest to the speaker and is owed patronage. The Registry of Physical Plant keeps an official list that runs to forty-one entries, though three of these are cross-references, one is the Registry itself, and two have been struck through and restored so many times the paper has worn through. Visitors are advised that no guild will lend its seals to a non-member, and that the lower stairwell light is out.