Floor 104

Floor 104 is a nominally administrative floor of the Central Stacks situated between Floor 101 and Floor 106, and is chiefly notable as the seat of the Bureau of Unclaimed Categories, the office responsible for the storage and eventual disposal of catalogue entries whose subjects have not been observed on any surveyed floor for a period exceeding one hundred and twelve years. It is the only floor in its bracket whose signage is printed in full on both faces of every door, a convention adopted after the Incident of the Two Hundreds (see below).

Layout and access

Floor 104 occupies an irregular quadrangle of approximately 2.1 hectares, bounded on three sides by the shelving of the Central Stacks and on the fourth by the service wall shared with Floor 106. Its principal access is the East Spine Stair, which arrives at the floor's only vestibule; the north stair is barred at the landing and has been since the sealing of Concordance 77. The floor contains four bays, a scriptorium, a counting room, and the long windowless hall known as the Hall of Provisional Holdings, in which unclaimed entries are shelved pending their hundred-and-twelfth year.

The vestibule rule is posted beside the East Spine landing: visitors are asked to sign the register on arrival and again on departure, and the register is checked at the close of each Reading Cycle. Clerks arriving for the early shift are exempt from the second signature. The rule is not enforced against persons carrying more than four volumes, on the grounds that the register cannot accommodate them.

History

The floor was surveyed and named in Concordance 19, which assigned it to "administrative uses not elsewhere provided." For its first recorded century it served as a general reception floor and a holding area for incoming consignments. The Bureau of Unclaimed Categories was established there in the winter of the year 1,140 by Librarian Aurel Voss in response to the accumulation of entries whose subjects had ceased to appear in the inventories without ever being formally struck. Voss's memorandum of establishment — the Voss Instruction — set the hundred-and-twelfth-year threshold and appointed the first Keeper, Keeper Hesper, whose name survives chiefly in the marginalia of the bay ledgers.

In the year 1,193 a fire in Bay 3 destroyed some four hundred provisional holdings. The Fire Inquiry of Bay 3 found that the shelves had been constructed in contravention of Concordance 441, which requires a void of two hands' breadth between any storage unit and a wall. The Inquiry's recommendation that the bay be rebuilt to the letter of the Concordance was never carried out; the shelves were re-erected exactly as before, on the reasoning that the Inquiry's authority did not extend to "altering the physical form of a floor once surveyed."

The Incident of the Two Hundreds

In the winter of the year 1,264, the sign-wrights of the Signworks Office were instructed to re-letter the doors of Floor 104. Through a clerical transposition in the work order, the numerals 101 and 106 were exchanged on the vestibule doors, so that arrivals from the East Spine were informed they had entered Floor 106 and departures from the far bay were informed they were leaving for Floor 101. The error went unnoticed for eleven days. During that period, some ninety consignments intended for the Bureau were delivered instead to Floor 101 and left unclaimed there, while visitors to Floor 104 signed the register of Floor 106 in good faith.

"The matter is not one of damage but of attribution. A floor that is called by another name for eleven days is, for those eleven days, that other floor in all respects save its position; and its position, being fixed, cannot be amended to match."

— Keeper Hesper II, Marginalia on the Bay Ledgers

The Incident of the Two Hundreds was eventually settled by Concordance 300, which established the principle of the Dual Face Signage Convention: every door on Floor 104 now bears its own number on the outer face and the number of the floor to which the room beyond is administratively assigned on the inner. In practice the two faces almost always agree, but the convention has never been repealed, and a small team of Sign Reconciliators checks the two faces against each other each quarter.

Disputed position

There is persistent disagreement in the literature as to whether Floor 104 lies between Floor 101 and Floor 106 or between Floor 106 and some other floor, the latter view arising from the sequence printed in the second recension of Concordance 19. The Cartography Office holds the first position; the Office of Floor Nomenclature has declined to confirm either, noting in its Nomenclature Bulletin for the year 1,302 that "the number of a floor is not an argument for its position, nor its position for its number." The dispute has never been formally joined, as neither office will accept a complaint from the other.

Floor 113 is sometimes cited in support of the second position on the grounds that its survey notes describe "a low administrative floor" to the south, which the second recension identifies as Floor 104 and the first recension does not identify at all.

Present use

Floor 104 remains the seat of the Bureau of Unclaimed Categories, whose Keeper is presently Keeper Hesper II, the office having passed twice through collateral lines. The Bureau's holdings are catalogued in the Provisional Register, which runs to some ninety volumes and is not open to readers without the written leave of the Keeper. Access to the Hall of Provisional Holdings is granted for the purpose of consulting a named entry only, and no more than three entries may be consulted in a single visit. Visitors are reminded that the Hall is not heated between the months of Dhu and Zer, and that the register in the vestibule should be signed with the pen provided rather than in pencil.