Floor 12,304

Description

Floor 12,304 is a high-numbered storage and intermittently occupied floor of the Tower, catalogued under the general heading of residual acquisitions. It is administratively situated between Floor 11,880 and Floor 12,441, though survey parties returning from the region have repeatedly declined to confirm that ordering. The floor is rectangular in plan, some 41 metres along its longer axis, and is distinguished by the presence of shelving that predates the shelves themselves — a condition the Office of Custodial Observation has recorded without resolution since the Fourth Concordance.

The floor is not remarkable for size, altitude, or content. It is remarkable for being the only floor in the Tower where the Librarians have twice attempted to close the catalogue and twice been overruled by it.

Contents

The holdings of Floor 12,304 are listed in the Register of Residual Acquisitions, currently in its ninth recension. The register runs to some 3,100 entries and includes, without apparent principle, a quantity of unlabelled crates; a set of correspondence in a hand no scribe has claimed; a chair with the wear pattern of a body that was never seated in it; and an annotated copy of the Seventh Concordance in which every third clause has been struck through by someone using the same pen.

Cataloguers working the floor in the winter of the Long Inventory noted that the crate labels bore floor numbers that do not exist, or exist in regions the Tower has not reached. The Office ruled in Concordance 1442, Annex 6 that such labels are to be transcribed verbatim and not corrected; the ruling was amended fourteen months later by Concordance 1457 to require correction, and amended again by Concordance 1501 to require neither. Three recensions of the Register have been produced under the three rulings, and all three are shelved on the floor, though only two are kept.

"The crate is to be recorded as found. Whether the crate was found is a separate question and belongs to a different annex."

— Concordance 1442, Annex 6, clause iii

Disputed numbering

The Tower's numbering does not run in any sequence that has been reconstructable, and Floor 12,304 is a standard illustration of the difficulty. The Revisers of Ascending Order hold that the floor lies between Floor 11,880 and Floor 12,441 on the strength of stairwell markings recovered during the Fourth Survey. The Office of Ordinal Disputes counters that the same stairwell markings, read from the opposite landing, place the floor between Floor 12,441 and Floor 13,002 — a reading which, if adopted, would move some seventy adjoining floors and require the reissue of the Register of Thresholds.

The dispute has been live since the Third Concordance and shows no sign of narrowing. A plaque beside the floor's threshold currently reads "12,304" in a hand dated by paleographic convention to no particular period. Removing it has been proposed on four occasions and declined on four, most recently on the grounds that the plaque, once removed, would have to be catalogued somewhere.

The Closure Episodes

In the winter of the Long Inventory, the Office attempted to close Floor 12,304 to new acquisitions on the grounds that its shelving had reached the density at which further entry displaces existing holdings. The closure order was posted on the threshold, countersigned, and sealed. The following morning, the shelves on the eastern wall had acquired eleven crates that no porter admitted to delivering, and the closure order itself had been filed under the crates as a supporting document.

A second attempt was made the following year, this time with the order affixed to the crates as well as the threshold. It survived nine days. The ninth day's inventory records the order as present, legible, and simultaneously listed under two floor numbers. The Office withdrew the second order and has not attempted a third; the relevant file in the Office of Custodial Observation is marked simply "not to be reopened without a Concordance," a note that has itself outlived two of the three Concordances it might have referred to.

The standard account of the episodes attributes them to shelving irregularity. A minority reading, advanced most forcefully by the Revisers of Ascending Order, holds that the floor is not being written to at all, but that it has been holding these acquisitions longer than the register has existed, and that the register is slowly catching up.

Access

Floor 12,304 may be reached by the eastern stair, which serves it directly, or by the western stair, which does not. Visitors are asked not to disturb the crates on the eastern wall. Pen nibs are checked at the threshold and returned on departure.

See also

• Register of Residual Acquisitions
• Fourth Survey
• Office of Ordinal Disputes
• Floor 11,880