Floor 288

Floor 288 is a registrational floor of the middle archive, situated — by the reckoning of the Concordance of Stairwells — between Floor 232 and Floor 449, though the floor's own stencil, repainted in the winter of 18-something that the record declines to fix precisely, reads Between 232 and 449, and do not ask again. It is principally occupied by the Office of Redundant Registrations, which maintains the Tower's duplicate holdings against loss, and by the several hundred clerks who dispute what a duplicate is. Floor 288 is the only floor in the middle archive whose visitors' log is itself kept in duplicate, and the two copies have not agreed since the Ninety-First Recension.

Layout and access

The floor is a single annular corridor of approximately 410 metres, lined on the inner face with ledger presses and on the outer with the reading desks of the Redundant Registrations office. The presses are numbered, but not in the order in which they stand; a press marked 14 may be found anywhere along the ring, and clerks navigate by the small brass markers set at the head of each aisle, which give the aisle's distance from the north aperture rather than its number.

Access is by the eastern stair from Floor 232 and by the western stair down to Floor 449. Visitors arriving by the eastern stair are required to sign twice; visitors arriving by the western stair sign once, but the entry is thereafter copied by hand into the eastern log by a duty clerk, and any discrepancy between the copy and the original is entered in the discrepancy book, which is itself kept in duplicate. In the autumn of 606's custodial inspection the two discrepancy books were found to disagree about the number of discrepancies, and both were ruled correct.

The Office of Redundant Registrations

The office was established under Concordance 88, which provided that any holding of the Tower likely to be consulted in more than one place should be registered in more than one place, "lest the reader be sent upward for want of a shelf" (Concordance 88, Annex 2). What began as a measure for fragile holdings grew, over four recensions, into a general programme: by the present day the office maintains secondary registrations for some 61,000 items, of which an estimated 9,000 are registrations of other registrations.

The office's founding clerk, Auditor Wenna of the third scriptorium, is remembered chiefly for a memorandum of 2001 in which she observed that a duplicate kept in the same room as its original is not a duplicate but a repetition, and that the distinction had already cost her eleven years. Her memorandum was entered in triplicate. Two copies survive.

The doctrine of the true copy

Scholarly opinion on Floor 288 divides, as it does everywhere, over which document governs. The Concordance of Stairwells holds that a registration is true if it faithfully reproduces its original, including the original's errors — "for the error is part of the thing registered, and to correct it is to register something else" (Concordance of Stairwells, Clause 12). The Concordance of Annexes holds the contrary: that a registration is true if it is correct, and that a faithful copy of an error is a new error and not a copy at all (Concordance of Annexes, Clause 12, sub-clause iii, added later, in a different hand).

Both clauses are numbered 12. The office has never resolved which is the earlier, because both were copied from a single lost original, and the copyists disagreed about the number 12 before they disagreed about anything else. Librarian Ossa of the Sixth Press proposed in 173 that the question be settled by lot, but the lots themselves had to be registered, and the office could not agree whether one set or two was required.

"Where an original and its registration differ, the original shall be presumed correct until the registration is consulted."

— Concordance of Annexes, Annex 7, marginal ruling of the Sixth Press

Incidents

In the winter of the year the office calls the Long Recension, a duty clerk named Clerk Ilvo Marren registered a single holding of the 441 press ninety-four times, having mistaken the instruction register to exhaustion for a quota rather than a warning against doing exactly this. The ninety-four entries were not withdrawn. They were, instead, registered, and the resulting press of secondary registrations — known informally on the floor as Marren's Reef — now occupies the southern arc of the corridor and is consulted by appointment. Marren was not disciplined; the office concluded that his error was faithful to its original and therefore, under one of the two Clause 12s, correct.

A second incident, less often cited, concerns the floor's visitors' log. During the 111 audit, the two logs were found to record different numbers of visitors on the same day, differing by one. The duty clerk maintained that the visitor in question had signed the eastern log and then, on reflection, unsiged it; the western log's copyist maintained that no such reflection had been entered. The audit sustained both positions and the visitor, whose name appears on neither log, was recorded as having visited.

Holdings

The following are the floor's principal holdings, as inventoried in the current register:

• the primary registration of the Redundant Registrations programme, in nine volumes, of which volumes four and five are duplicates of one another;
• the discrepancy book, in duplicate;
• Marren's Reef, ninety-four entries, southern arc, by appointment;
• the brass aisle markers, forty-one in number, one missing and one of uncertain provenance;
• the visitors' logs, eastern and western, and the copy of the western log made from the eastern.

Inquiries concerning the floor should be addressed to the Office of Redundant Registrations in the first instance, and to the same office in the second. Replies to the first inquiry are not carried over to the second. Floor 288 is closed to visitors during recension, except to those who have already signed.