Floor 112: The Archivium of Lost Causes

Floor 112: The Archivium of Lost Causes is a holding floor on the eleventh gallery of the Northern Stair, given over entirely to the preliminary registry of causes pronounced lost before their documentation has been completed. It is not to be confused with the Vault of Lost Causes on the descending eastern spiral of Floor 404: The Archive of Lost Protocols, which serves as the final repository, nor with the Scriptorium of Lost Causes on the northwestern mezzanine of Floor 1,117, which performs verification and analysis. The Archivium occupies the earlier, humbler position in the sequence: it is where a cause is first entered as lost, and where it waits — sometimes for centuries — to be confirmed as such.

Establishment and the Winter Recension

The Archivium was constituted under Concordance 88, clause 6, following the winter of the year 2,041 AA, when the intake of unverified lost causes at the Scriptorium exceeded the shelving available on Floor 1,117 by an estimated nine hundred and forty linear feet. Senior Registrar Ovell Thane proposed that causes not yet adjudicated be held on a separate floor pending confirmation, and the Bureau of Shelf Survival approved the transfer on the condition that no cause be described as lost in any binding document until it had been so confirmed in writing. Floor 112 was selected because its ambient humidity, at forty-one per cent, fell within the tolerance specified for parchment awaiting adjudication in Annex 7.4 of the Vault instruments.

The difficulty, noted at once by the Registrar and never resolved, is that the floor's own name describes its holdings as lost — a designation that the Bureau's condition forbade. Concordance 91, adopted eleven years later, addressed the matter by declaring that the name of a floor is not a binding document. This is the origin of the Archivium's most frequently cited precedent and its most frequently contested one.

Arrangement of the Shelves

The Archivium is arranged by the manner of loss rather than by date, cause, or petitioner. The bays run in a fixed order, and the Walker's Index posted at the head of the floor lists them as follows:

• Bays i–xiv: causes lost to silence
• Bays xv–xxii: causes lost to premature conclusion
• Bays xxiii–xxxi: causes lost to the withdrawal of their petitioners
• Bays xxxii–xl: causes lost to causes unknown, held in escrow

The escrowed bays are the subject of a standing dispute with the Office of Unattributed Losses, which maintains that a cause whose manner of loss is unknown cannot be classified as lost at all and should be returned to general circulation. The Archivium's reply, entered in the floor register by Thane in 2,067 and never superseded, is that a cause unknown to be lost is not thereby known to be found.

Access and the Footwear Rule

Consultation is by petition to the floor warden, and readers are admitted in pairs, no party being permitted to search the bays alone on the ground that a cause confirmed lost by a single reader is thereafter treated as confirmed. Overboots are required in bays xxxii–xl. The floor closes at the ninth bell and does not reopen for the ringing of the tenth, whatever the bell is ringing for.

Requests for the removal of a document from Floor 112 must be countersigned by the Keeper of the Lower Register and are, in practice, granted only to the Scriptorium. In 2,114 a reader named Clerk Amarine Vesh applied on her own behalf to remove a single leaf concerning a lapsed survey of the Eastern Chutes. The application was refused on the ground that she was not a body. She reapplied as the Vesh Committee of One, was granted the leaf, and returned it eleven days later, having found it to be the wrong leaf. The correct leaf has not been located.

The Inventory Question

The Archivium has never produced a complete inventory, and the reason is doctrinal rather than clerical. Under Concordance 91, Annex 2, a cause becomes lost only upon confirmation, and confirmation requires that the cause be entered in the register of lost causes. But an entry in that register is itself a binding document. The result is that no cause can be formally confirmed without appearing in a document that describes it as lost before it has been confirmed — the very circularity the Bureau sought to prevent.

"The register of the lost shall not be compiled from the register of the lost."

— Concordance 91, Annex 2, paragraph 3

The Scriptorium of Lost Causes has boycotted two joint committees on the question, most recently the Committee on Recursive Registers convened in 2,208, and its senior Librarians have declined to endorse any of the four proposed resolutions. The Palimpsest of Omitted Causes, which would have broken the circle by recording causes only after they ceased to matter, was withdrawn before ratification.

Points of Scholarly Disagreement

The principal disagreement concerns the floor's relationship to the Vault. Concordance 88 describes Floor 112 as a "waiting floor," implying that all holdings eventually transfer to the Vault of Lost Causes. The Concordance of Access and Delay, clause 19, describes the same floor as a "terminal preliminary," implying that nothing ever leaves it. The Lost Concordance Faction held, in its Third Minute, that the discrepancy was deliberate and that both readings were correct depending on whether the cause had been pursued sincerely — a formulation the Scriptorium rejected and then, six years later, adopted.

A smaller dispute concerns the escrowed bays. The Office of Unattributed Losses holds that they are empty; the floor warden's returns for every year since 2,071 record them as full. Neither party has proposed opening them, and the question is considered settled for the present.