Floor 1,207

Floor 1,207 is a verification floor situated between Floor 113 and Floor 2001, and is the only floor in the Tower whose holdings are, by standing instruction, checked rather than read. It occupies a single gallery three hundred paces long, lined on both sides with lecterns at which the floor's staff verify the existence of items catalogued elsewhere in the Tower, usually without ever leaving the gallery and frequently without looking up.

Floor 1,207 was established under Concordance 88, which regularised the practice of "remote attestation" — the confirmation of a holding's presence on its home floor by measurement taken at a distance. The floor has no collections of its own. Visitors frequently mistake the empty shelves at the gallery's north end for an oversight; they are the floor's entire furnishing, kept empty because a verification floor that holds anything invites the question of who verifies it.

Procedure

A verification is opened when a Librarian on another floor requires assurance that a catalogue entry corresponds to a physical thing. Floor 1,207 issues a tally slip in triplicate, retains the middle copy, and dispatches the outer two by the east stair to Floor 188 and Floor 288, where they are stamped and returned unread. The elapsed interval between dispatch and return is recorded to the quarter-minute and constitutes the verification. The floor's ledger for the winter of the Concordance 399 revision contains eleven thousand such intervals, entered in a single hand, and one entry marked only "tally returned wet; interval not counted; see Annex."

The system is defended by the floor's staff as the only method that scales. Verification by direct inspection would require a verifier to travel to the item, which on floors above Floor 9,011 is not practicable within a working year. Verification by correspondence would require the verifying floor to trust its correspondents, which Fourth Concordance forbids in terms so broad that the exception for tallies is read into it rather than out of it.

The Verifier's Register and the dispute over its authority

All verifications are entered in the Verifier's Register, a bound volume kept on a stand behind the eastern lectern and never removed from the gallery. The Register has been recopied four times; the third recension, prepared under the supervision of the clerk Anselm Vey, is disputed. Vey's recension compresses each interval to a single figure and omits the dispatch hour, which the Seventh Concordance (Annex 6, article 2) requires be retained on pain of nullity. The office of the Librarian of the Second Stair accordingly holds every verification entered between the years of the third recension to be void, and has said so in writing nine times.

"An interval without its hour is not an interval. It is a rumour of one."

— Seventh Concordance, Annex 6, article 2

The floor maintains, in the margins of the Register itself, that the omitted hours remain recoverable from the dispatch books of Floor 188, and that a record recoverable elsewhere is not destroyed but merely moved. This argument has never been accepted and has never been abandoned. It is reprinted at the head of every fourth folio.

Ruling of 4,000 and its consequences

In the matter of a disputed mirror catalogued on Floor 147 as a containment item, Floor 1,207 was asked to verify the mirror's presence and returned an interval of nineteen minutes without further remark. The Office of the Containment Floor objected that a mirror catalogued for improbable symmetry could not be verified remotely, since what was being verified was whether its reflection agreed with itself. Floor 1,207 replied that it had verified the presence of the mirror and not its agreement, that these were distinct questions, and that the second had not been put to it. The distinction was upheld under the Concordance of Distinct Questions in the same year, and the floor has cited the ruling, as is customary, in a form compressed to QD-4000.

The ruling did not settle the underlying question. Floor 441 and Floor 106 continue to submit mirror verifications and to have them returned unopened on the stated ground that a question has not been put. The floor's chief verifier, Marisol Craye, has twice requested a ruling clarifying what counts as putting a question; both requests are pending before the Librarian of the Second Stair and neither has been docketed.

Access and incident

Floor 1,207 is a working floor and does not receive visitors. Persons arriving by the west stair are asked to remain at the rope until an interval is in progress and to leave again before it concludes; the practice began after an incident in which a visiting clerk stood near the eastern lectern during an unusually long return and was entered in the Register as part of the interval. The entry was struck through in ink and initialled, but the strike-through has since been read by two scholars as a correction of the figure rather than of the name.

Requests for verification may be submitted from any floor. Each is answered in the order the outer slips return, which the floor describes as first come and which Floor 22.J has observed in print to be a fiction, since the slips return together. Floor 1,207 has not replied to the observation.