The Binders' Guild

Extract from the Handbook for New Members of the Worshipful Guild of Binders and Folders, Kessel Street, Varrow. Edition of 1211, issued under the seal of the Master folder. To be read before the member's first meeting, and kept.

A welcome from the Master folder

You have joined the oldest guild in Varrow that still does what it was founded to do.

Other guilds in this city have become dining clubs, or charities, or lists of names on a wall. We still bind books, and we still fold, and we still keep the folds of Kessel Street safe, under a Charter that our members barricaded this street for nine days to win. I ask you to remember that each time you pick up a sheet of paper here.

A fold is the best of us made small. Our first duty is to keep it whole.

Absalom Thrale, Master folder

What the guild is for

The guild has four duties under the Kessel Charter and its own ordinances:

1. To keep the register of folds, in which every fold on the street is entered as a person.
2. To settle disputes between folds, between folds and people, and between people about folds, at the guild bench.
3. To keep the Guildhall Book, and to put questions to it on the street's behalf.
4. To keep the bells: the six bells in the guildhall tower known as the Signatures, within sound of which a fold may wake.

Everything else the guild does, from apprenticeships to the annual dinner, exists to serve those four.

The offices

• Master folder. Elected by the full members for seven years, and may stand again. Chairs the guild, signs for it, and represents the street before the city.
• Archivist. Keeps the guild's archive and the Guildhall Book, and is the only member who may put a question to the Book.
• Registrar. Keeps the register of folds and the sample book of members' hands.
• Bell-warden. Keeps the Signatures, and rings them at dawn, noon and dusk.
• The bench. Three full members chosen by lot each new year to hear disputes. The Master may not sit on the bench.

The register of folds

Since 1174, the year after the Charter, every fold on Kessel Street has been entered in the register as a person. Each entry records the fold's shape, what it was folded for, the date it woke, the address where it lives, and the name of its folder.

It also records the folder's mark. Every folder's creases are as individual as handwriting: the pressure of the bone, the angle of the edge, the order of the folds, the small habits a hand cannot help. A trained eye can tell one folder's crane from another's at arm's length. To make such comparisons possible, every member of the guild folds a sample sheet on the day they join, in a set pattern, and the sheet is kept in the sample book in the archive for as long as the guild stands.

You will fold yours after reading this handbook. Take your time. It will outlast you.

Disputes heard at the bench

The bench hears perhaps a dozen disputes in a year. A few from the record, so that you know what to expect:

• 1179. A crane and a draper, over a shop window. The bench held that the window belonged to the shop and the view to the crane.
• 1188. A letter-fold that refused to be delivered, because its addressee had moved. The bench held that a letter is addressed to a person and not to a house, and gave it leave to go and find him. It did.
• 1196. A paper hat folded for a wedding, which its folder wished to wear to a funeral. The bench held that it could not be made to attend. The hat was grateful and has been celebrating ever since.
• 1203. A ledger's complaint against its own owner, for an entry altered in pencil. The bench found for the ledger. The bench always finds for the ledger, and members are advised not to argue with one in the first place.

Rules for members

• Never unfold a fold. Not to mend it, not to see how it was made, not for any reason at all.
• Never take a crease. The harvesting of creases is the oldest crime on the street and the gravest under the Charter.
• Never force a fold into a new shape. A fold may refold itself by its own choice, and only so.
• Report any fold found unfolded to the Registrar the same day, and touch nothing.
• Fold with meaning or not at all. Idle folding wastes paper and makes small, confused gods.

Roll of Master folders since the Charter

The Guildhall Book

New members are permitted to view the Book from the rail at the back of the hall, on any weekday afternoon, in silence. You may not touch it. You may not ask it anything. Only the archivist may do that.

The history of the Book is told in the short pamphlet sold at the guildhall door, which every new member should read and most do not. It costs two pence. The Registrar has change.