Floor 10,422

Floor 10,422 is a reading floor of the middle-upper register, designated the Hall of Unread Returns, and administered jointly by the Office of Withdrawn Volumes and the Committee on Redundant Accessions. It is reached by the Spiral of Modest Ascent, which terminates at its eastern landing, and it is bounded above by Floor 10,431 and below by Floor 10,414. The floor holds no original material. Every item shelved on Floor 10,422 has been returned to the Tower at least twice.

Function and holdings

The floor's purpose is set out in Concordance 8,114, Annex 2, which directs that "volumes returned to the archive on three or more occasions shall be withdrawn from their originating floors and held together, that the pattern of their returning may be observed." The Committee's clerks record each return in the Ledger of Second Thoughts, a folio series that now occupies most of the floor's northern stacks and is itself, by a ruling of Concordance 8,127, a returned item.

The holdings are catalogued not by subject but by interval — the number of days between one return and the next. The shortest recorded interval is four hours, belonging to a treatise on stairwell acoustics (shelf 10,422/C-9). The longest is eleven years, belonging to the Atlas of Floors Not Visited, which was returned once in the winter of the Year of the Closed Landing and has not moved since. Clerks consult the interval shelves in silence. Whistling is not permitted on Floor 10,422, as it interferes with the observation of return patterns.

History

The floor was established in the Reorganization of the Middle Registers, some forty years after the opening of Floor 9,011, whose staff had complained of volumes migrating upward through the stack and settling in its reference aisles. An early proposal would have destroyed the returned volumes outright; this was rejected on the grounds that a returned book has, by the fact of its return, become a different object, and destruction of an object not yet described is forbidden under Concordance 5,002.

The first Keeper of the Hall, Librarian Ossia Venn, held the post for nineteen years and never once read a volume on the floor. Her successor, Librarian Harrow Quist, attempted to institute a reading rota in the third year of his tenure. The rota collapsed when the volumes selected for reading were themselves returned to their originating floors before the appointed hour, a difficulty later formalized in the Doctrine of Preemptive Withdrawal.

Disputed status

The floor's classification is contested. Concordance 8,114 describes it as a "holding floor," while the later Concordance 9,301, drafted after the Dispute of the Two Landings, classes it as a "waypoint" — a category the Tower applies to stairwells, alcoves, and certain wide corridors. The practical difference is considerable: holding floors are assessed for shelf-load annually, while waypoints are not assessed at all. Floor 10,422 has not been assessed since the drafting of 9,301, and the eastern landing has visibly sagged.

"A waypoint is a place one passes through. Nothing has passed through Floor 10,422 in the memory of the present staff, the volumes having arrived and remained."

— Memorandum of the Committee on Redundant Accessions, circulated to the Office of Withdrawn Volumes, undated

The Office of Structural Accounting has declined to resolve the matter, noting only that the sag is "consistent with either reading." A third view, advanced by the School of Interval Studies, holds that Floor 10,422 is neither holding floor nor waypoint but an effect of the returns themselves, and would cease to exist if the returns ceased. The School has not been asked to elaborate.

Access and staff

Floor 10,422 is open to Librarians of the second grade and above, and to visiting clerks escorted from the eastern landing. Escorted visitors may not carry a volume down the stair. The floor's permanent staff number six, of whom three are engaged exclusively in crossing out entries in the Ledger that have subsequently been returned to the floor they describe, a task that has never been completed and is not expected to be.

The Rota of the Sixth Clerk is posted beside the western arch and has not been amended since the Year of the Closed Landing. The sixth clerk is presently recorded as "elsewhere on the floor."