Floor 241

Description

Floor 241 is a custodial and residential floor of the Tower, administratively situated between Floor 232 and Floor 260. It is catalogued principally for its holdings of unfiled correspondence — letters received by the Librarians which were never assigned a shelfmark, and which accumulate in the floor's sorting hall at a rate recorded by the Office of Receipts as between four and nine items per day. The floor's standing designation is the Hall of Second Arrivals, a title conferred by the Third Concordance and subsequently amended twice without being replaced.

Layout

Floor 241 comprises three contiguous chambers. The first, the Sorting Hall, receives all correspondence addressed to the Tower without sufficient direction; this includes letters addressed to floors that do not currently exist, letters addressed to persons rather than locations, and letters whose superscriptions have been abraded to illegibility. The second chamber, known as the Receptacle, holds items which have been sorted but not claimed. The third is a small office, unoccupied since the tenure of the clerk Hesper Aldane, whose desk remains in place by order of the Ninth Concordance. The ceiling of the Sorting Hall is approximately 4.1 metres in height, though three separate measurements taken in the winter of the Long Recension returned figures of 3.8, 4.1, and 6.0 metres respectively. The discrepancy has not been resolved and is not considered urgent.

Correspondence

Letters held on Floor 241 are notable for their addressees. A survey conducted by the Office of Unresolved Address in the year 812 of the Third Recension examined 1,000 items and found the following distribution:

• 412 addressed to floors bearing no entry in the standard index
• 287 addressed to named individuals with no recorded post on any floor
• 199 addressed to the Tower itself, without further specification
• 102 addressed to persons who, according to the rolls, are still living and have filed no forwarding instruction

The final category accounts for the majority of items which are eventually retrieved. Retrieval requires a written claim countersigned by two Librarians, a requirement which Hesper Aldane described in a memorandum of the year 809 as "a lock fitted to a door that opens outward."

The Aldane Dispute

The floor's best-known administrative history concerns the correspondence of the clerk Hesper Aldane, who served on Floor 241 for eleven years. Aldane maintained that a substantial portion of the Receptacle's holdings were addressed to him personally, and that the classification of these items as "unfiled" was an error of the sorting process rather than a failure of direction. The dispute was adjudicated twice: once in Aldane's favour, and once against, by two panels of the Concordance Court sitting in the same year. The ruling of the second panel, which stands, held that a letter may not be considered correctly addressed to a person whose name does not appear on the floor's roster in the capacity in which the letter addresses them. Aldane's name appears on the roster as clerk. A small annex adjoining the Receptacle bears Aldane's name on its doorplate. The annex contains shelves; the shelves contain letters; the letters are addressed to Aldane in his capacity as something the roster does not record.

Administrative Position

Floor 241's placement between Floor 232 and Floor 260 is confirmed by the Second Concordance, though an earlier ordering places it between Floor 228 and Floor 245. The second ordering is retained in the archive as an alternative recension and is still cited by the stairwells' maintenance staff, who find it more convenient for scheduling. The floor shares a service corridor with Floor 249, and disputes over the corridor's lighting have persisted since the two floors were first linked. The matter is listed on the docket of the Concordance Court and has not yet been reached.

Visiting

Visitors to Floor 241 are permitted in the Sorting Hall between the eighth and eleventh hours. They may not remove items from the Receptacle, and they may not read the correspondence of Hesper Aldane.

See Also

• Floor 249
• Floor 202
• Third Concordance
• Office of Unresolved Address