Codex Locatorium

Codex Locatorium is the administrative codex governing spatial assignment within the Tower and the maintenance of the Master Floor Index. It is not, as is sometimes supposed by junior cataloguers, a record of where things are. It is a record of where things have been assigned, which the Codex itself distinguishes from location in its opening clause: "An object may be found in a place it was never given; it may not be given a place in which it is never found." The distinction has never been satisfactorily explained and is regarded by most Librarians as settled.

The Codex is held in the Ninth Bindery and is consulted chiefly by the Office of Vertical Registry, which administers floor numbers. It has been amended forty-one times. The current working text is the Locatorium Recension XXXIX, though Recension XL has been in preparation since the winter of the Year of the Closed Aperture and is widely reported to contradict its predecessor in the matter of mezzanines.

Scope and structure

The Codex is divided into four books. Book I treats of floor numbers and their non-sequential assignment; Book II treats of floor names and the conditions under which a name may be revoked; Book III treats of the Master Floor Index and its custody; Book IV, added under Concordance 212 and never fully integrated, treats of stairwells.

The numbering provisions of Book I are the most frequently cited and the least frequently obeyed. The Codex does not require numbers to ascend with height, descend with depth, or observe any relation to one another whatsoever. It requires only that a number, once assigned, not be reassigned while its floor remains standing. The Office of Vertical Registry has interpreted "standing" broadly, and no floor has yet been held to have fallen.

Book II permits a floor to bear up to three names concurrently, provided each is registered separately and none is used to contradict another in writing. Floors bearing three names are exempt from the ordinary signage requirements. The Forty-Second Concordance later fixed the maximum at two, and the discrepancy remains open; in practice the Registry registers two names and files the third under seal.

The Master Floor Index

The Master Floor Index is a single bound volume, currently some eleven thousand folios, kept under continuous revision by the Keeper of the Index. It records every floor's number, every registered name, and the date of assignment. It does not record contents. This is deliberate. The Codex states at Book III, clause 9: "The Index shall describe the shelf, not the book, lest the Index become a library and require an Index of its own."

The Index has twice been rebuilt from secondary sources. The first rebuilding followed the Loss of the Eastern Stacks, in which the Index was submerged and dried by the Drying Office over nine months with unsatisfactory results. The second followed the discovery, in a stairwell between floors numbered 8 and 91, of a duplicate Index differing from the official copy in 340 entries. The Adjudication of the Two Indexes ruled that neither was authoritative and that both should be retained, a decision described by the then Keeper as "the worst available option, and therefore correct."

Relation to the Codex Classificatorius

The Codex Locatorium governs where a holding is assigned; the Codex Classificatorius governs how it is described once assigned. The two are frequently confused by visiting scholars and never by cataloguers. The division is stated plainly in the Locatorium's prefatory note: "The Classificatorius asks what a thing is. This Codex asks where it may be said to be. The second question is the easier and has taken longer."

Because the Classificatorius is axiomatic for the Deterministic Codex and, through it, for the compilation of Codex IV, disputes over floor assignment can acquire considerable weight. The Dispute of the Misplaced Atrium turned on whether a floor reassigned under the Locatorium retained its classification under the Classificatorius, or whether the object's description followed it to the new floor. The Seventeenth Concordance held that it did. The Twenty-Third Concordance held that it did not. Both remain in force. The Office of Doctrinal Reconciliation has declined to resolve the matter on the grounds that resolution would set a precedent, and that the Tower "has precedents enough."

The Stairwell Question

Book IV was appended after a survey found that 61 per cent of stairwells between named floors were unnamed and unnumbered, and that at least nine connected floors bearing the same number. The Book proposes that stairwells be assigned designations of their own, but does not specify a format, and the Standing Committee on Vertical Circulation has produced four incompatible schemes without adopting any.

In the interim, the Committee instructs that stairwells be referred to by the two floors they connect, in ascending order of the numerals as printed. Where the numerals are equal, the stairwell is to be referred to by the name of the landing at its top. Where the landing is also unnamed, the stairwell is not to be referred to.

Notable recensions and a grievance

Recension XXII introduced the requirement that every floor assignment be countersigned by a second Librarian. Recension XXIII removed the requirement. Recension XXIV restored it and added that the second Librarian must not be the first. The Recension XXXI added the further condition that the second Librarian must not be the first Librarian's subordinate, superior, or habitual correspondent.

The Grievance of Clerk Ondrey Vasp arises from this last provision. Vasp, assigned to the Registry for eleven years, countersigned 4,200 floor assignments before it was observed that he and the assigning clerk, Mira Holt, had exchanged no correspondence of any kind in that period. The assignments were held valid, as the prohibition concerned habitual correspondents only, but Vasp's countersignature was struck from the register on the technical ground that he had signed as "O. Vasp" on 311 occasions where the form required the full name. Vasp maintained that the abbreviation was customary in his office and had been accepted for a decade. The Adjudication of Abbreviated Signatures found for the Registry and commended Vasp for his diligence. He is understood to have taken this badly.

The Codex is presently read aloud in full at the opening of each Registry session, a practice suspended in Floor 404 owing to the length of Book III and not resumed.