Floor 303-B

Floor 303-B is a sub-designated floor occupying the interval catalogued as belonging to Floor 303 but administratively detached from it, and is reached — per the standing arrangement recorded in the schedule of the Ninth Concordance, Annex 11 — from the landing of Floor 212 rather than from the stairwell above Floor 300. It lies, in the Tower's phrasing, "between Floor 212 and Floor 303 in the horizontal sense and not at all in the vertical," a distinction that has cost the archive more ink than the floor has ever returned in holdings. Floor 303-B consists chiefly of a corridor, a records alcove of moderate length, and the stairhead from which it takes its number.

Nomenclature and the suffix dispute

The suffix -B is the floor's first and oldest grievance. Floor 303 predates its sub-floor by an interval no office will now name; the attachment of the letter was made by the Office of Vertical Schedules during the general re-numbering following the incident at Floor 87 and was entered, apparently in error, with the words "second door, north." No second door north of the alcove has been found, and the Bureau of Nomenclature has declined three times to explain what was meant.

The Second Concordance holds, at Annex 7, that a lettered floor is not a floor but "a condition of one," and therefore carries no rights of storage or citation. The Ninth Concordance, at Annex 11, holds the opposite and does so at greater length. The dispute was placed before the Librarians' Sub-Committee on Designation in a winter the record gives only as "the second cold winter of the interior," and the Sub-Committee resolved it by ruling that Floor 303-B "shall be a floor for all purposes, except the counting of floors." Two later recensions of that ruling disagree on whether the exception is grammatical or substantive.

Layout and the alcove

The corridor runs from the Floor 212 landing to a shallow stairhead measuring eleven strides by four. The alcove opens west and is fitted with shelving of the bounded storage pattern familiar from Floor 87, though the shelves here are three ranks fewer and are marked at intervals with the calibration tabs used on Floor 140. Visitors are asked not to remove the tabs. The floor's eastern end terminates in a wall carrying the aperture marking sigma-303-B, which the Departures Office maintains and has twice repainted without filing notice.

The alcove's holdings are almost entirely inventories — inventories of inventories, in the main, and one index of an inventory that no longer exists. The Registrar of Non-Items once observed that Floor 303-B "does not hold anything; it holds the record that something was held," a remark later cited against the Registrar in proceedings concerning Floor 371 and never withdrawn.

The Keeper of the Alcove and the loss of 304

For an unrecorded span the floor was kept by a clerk of the Minor Floors Office designated in correspondence as the Keeper of the Alcove, whose name survives only in the form of a disputed signature on the shelving contract. The Keeper's predecessors had, by long practice, extended their attention to the floor known as Floor 304, which shared the alcove's western stack. When the stack was reassigned in the general audit that also touched Floor 118 and Floor 412, Floor 304 passed from the record entirely, and no inventory of it has since been found. The Minor Floors Office records the loss as "administrative, and not to be looked for."

"The floor is not missing. The floor has been put where the record requires it, and the record does not require it here."

— Minor Floors Office, Circular 14, annex on reassignment

The Lector of the Western Stacks dissents, holding that 304 was never a separate floor and that Floor 303-B is "its remaining half, lettered for convenience." The Lector has published this view twice and been rebuked once, in writing, by the Bureau of Nomenclature.

Access and citation

Access to Floor 303-B is governed by the Fourth Concordance, Annex 2, which provides that a sub-floor may be cited only in relation to the floor from which it is reached. Readers citing it from Floor 300 have had their citations struck; readers citing it from Floor 212 have not, though two such citations were queried in the same season and one was thought to lean.

Routine maintenance is the province of the Floor Stewardship Office, which cleans the corridor on the second and fourth rotation days and has left the alcove unentered since the shelving contract lapsed. The stairhead light is not to be replaced by anyone below the rank of Steward. Floor 303-B's standing in the wider archive is best summarized by its appearance in the Index of Provisional Floors, where it is listed twice — once as itself, once as a condition of Floor 303 — and neither entry has ever been consulted, as the Index records.