Empty Floors

Empty Floors are, per the Precedent Register of the Department of Matriculation, those levels of the Tower whose designated subject of cataloguing is an absence, a nullity, or a void — as distinct from ordinary floors whose holdings have merely not yet been shelved, and from the class of levels entered in the Master Register as "unassigned pending survey." The distinction is administrative rather than evidentiary. A floor is Empty if its mandate says so; whether anything is, in fact, on it has never been thought a question for the catalogue.

The number of Empty Floors is disputed and has been since at least the Regency of the Empty Chair, during which period scholars hold that the true count was obscured — partly by the high incidence of quiet resignation among Librarians-Provisional, and partly because the Regency reassigned several flights of stairs to floors that had not previously possessed them. Estimates in current circulation run from eleven to "eleven, substantially."

The Problem and Its Resolutions

The Problem of Empty Floors names the crisis of administrative ontology that arose when the Matriculation clerks could not agree on how to describe a floor whose catalogue entry is a blank. The crisis precipitated the Ordinance of Calibrated Absence, which fixed the rule still in force: an Empty Floor is to be described by the precise dimensions of its emptiness, not by its contents.

The settlement was not theological but metrical. The Ordinance of Calibrated Absence, clause 9, requires of every Matriculation survey:

"That the surveyor record the length, breadth, and height of the nullity, in cubits, to two places; and that the surveyor record nothing else whatsoever."

— Ordinance of Calibrated Absence, clause 9

A certain Librarian-Provisional, Sennet Vow, was censured in the winter of the fourth recension for recording in the margin the word "drafty." The censure was upheld on appeal, though the margin was preserved, and Vow's note is now itself catalogued — on a non-empty floor — as the earliest surviving observation of an Empty Floor's climate.

Nullity Realism and Its Opponents

The Nullity Realists formed following the Problem, holding that an Empty Floor's emptiness is a positive holding — that there is a definite something which is the absence, and that the archive's failure to name it is a failure of vocabulary rather than of substance. Their opponents, the Circumstantialists, argue from the Correspondents of the Empty Shelf that an absence is only ever the residue of a removal, and that to catalogue one is to catalogue a habit of the catalogue rather than a thing.

The disagreement is older than either school. Third Concordance, Clause 22 treats empty levels as "not yet furnished, and not to be counted," while Regulation 8 counts every level of the Tower "without exception or plea of vacancy." Both remain in force. A clerk may cite either, and both citations are accepted; the Matriculation clerks keep a list of which citation each floor was last established under, and the list disagrees with itself in forty-one places.

Objects, Niches, and the Thorne Precedent

Physical items of unknown provenance found on Empty Floors are held to be a category error in themselves, and in response to the frequency with which such items were in fact found, the Thorne Object category was established. Thorne Objects are housed in Thorne Niches, recesses of a standard design specified by the Seventh Concordance and revised in the Controversy of the Empty Niche. A niche is not permitted to be empty; where no Thorne Object is available for housing, a small sealed box of sawdust is deposited, which is held to satisfy the requirement without satisfying the definition.

The Cabinet 12-C/1 holds the register of Thorne Objects and Thorne Niches, and its own index is missing.

Furnishing and Use

Empty Floors are not closed to traffic, and are used for storage of the surplus furniture of the Tower, which is considerable. The standing rule is that an Empty Floor's emptiness is not to be disturbed by use, but that furniture stored upon it does not count as disturbance, being mobile. A note in the Empty Shelf's former file, before the Empty Shelf was dissolved by clause 412 of The Forty-Seventh Concordance, records that a chaise-longue had stood on an Empty Floor near the Receding Reference Desk for the better part of a century, and that it had been entered in the inventory as a visitor.

The Auditors of the Empty Shelf were, until their dissolution, the body responsible for determining which Empty Floors had been disturbed. Their final report found that all had, and recommended no action.

Notable Holdings

• Floor unnamed in the Register, surveyed at 6 by 9 by 4 cubits; the nullity was found to have shifted 2 cubits westward between the second and third recensions.
• Floor designated "the Empty Chair," distinguished from the Empty Chair itself, which is an object and occupies a chair.
• Arrin of the Empty Pockets, whose petition to the Empty Shelf was the first to be entered, heard, and granted after his death.

The Master Register of Empty Floors is maintained by the Department of Matriculation and is currently held in a corridor, the register room having been emptied in the ordinary course and subsequently counted.