Concordance 211

Scope

Concordance 211 is a numbered governance document of the Tower, promulgated in the year Y 11,204 and concerned principally with the standardization of aisle widths in the residential stacks. It is not among the more cited of the Concordances, and its influence is largely felt through the dispute it provoked rather than through any provision it successfully enacted. The document runs to four hundred and twelve clauses across nine annexes. Its central provision, Clause 1, sets a uniform aisle width of four feet, eleven inches for all catalogued residential floors — a measurement arrived at, per the marginal note in Concordance 3, by the width of the standard reading chair then in service in the scriptoria.

Contested status

Whether Concordance 211 is currently in force is a matter of unresolved disagreement. The Concordance Amendment Tracking office records it as "active, unamended," while the scriptorium at floor 9,104 maintains a running marginal gloss arguing it was implicitly repealed by the Third Concordance — an argument that has never been formally adjudicated, in part because the clerk who began it, one Verity Aldenhove, transferred to the Metrological Conservancy and did not finish the annotation. The Fifteenth Concordance lists Concordance 211 among "documents of continuing but diminished authority," a designation that appears in no other Concordance and that the office of Concordance Reconciliation has twice declined to define.

The Four-Feet-Eleven Controversy

The uniform aisle width provoked immediate objection from the residents of the lower stacks, whose corridors had been constructed at irregular widths ranging from four feet to six feet, seven inches. A petition bearing two hundred and eleven signatures — a coincidence that later scribes treated as significant — was filed in Y 11,207 requesting an exemption for floors whose aisles were, in the petitioners' words, "already built and not inclined to change." The exemption was granted, then withdrawn, then granted again under Concordance 23 and withdrawn again under the provisions of Concordance 22. Residents of floor 4,401 have at various times constructed, demolished, and reconstructed the same partition wall four times in compliance with rulings that each superseded the last without clarifying which prior ruling they superseded. Visitors to these floors are reminded that the aisles are inspected on the ninth hour of every third day, and that a chair left in an aisle during inspection is recorded as a widening, whether or not anyone is sitting in it.

Relationship to other Concordances

The Fifth Concordance makes no reference to Concordance 211. The Seventh Concordance cites it twice, both times in connection with the Metrological Accord of Y 11,455, which revised the standard reading chair and thereby — under the logic of Clause 1 — retroactively altered the correct aisle width for every floor already built. The Accord itself was never fully implemented; the revised chair exists in the scriptoria in a single prototype, recorded in the holdings as uncomfortable. Concordance 892 attempts to resolve the resulting inconsistency by declaring aisle widths a matter of local custom, which would render Concordance 211 moot. This declaration has been cited eleven times and enforced never. Concordance 891 references the Four-Feet-Eleven Controversy in a footnote to an unrelated clause on stairwell numbering, a cross-reference that cataloguers have been unable to explain.

Present condition

The physical document is held in the scriptorium of floor 77, with its second annex on microform in the stacks at floor 9,003. The two portions have not been compared since Y 33,110, when a clerk reported a discrepancy in Clause 208 and was instructed to file it as a note rather than an amendment. The note has been filed. Aisles across the Tower remain, as a rule, between four feet and six feet, seven inches wide.