Floor 4001

Floor 4001 is an administrative and vermicular floor of the middle-upper stack, situated between Floor 2001 and Floor 2004 and reached, in ordinary practice, by way of the Floor 2001 stairwell or the north shaft serving Floor π. It is best known as the seat of the Bureau of Unfinished Business, the depository of the Ledger of Omissions, and the only floor in the Tower whose name has been struck from the register three times and restored twice.

The floor is not to be confused with Floor 4000, with which it shares a landing, a boiler wall, and — since the Concordance of Shared Services, 1104 — a single night porter.

Layout and fabric

Floor 4001 occupies an irregular footprint of approximately 2.1 hectares, most of it given over to the Ledger of Omissions itself: a shelved volume-in-progress whose constituent pages are filed as the omissions occur, so that the floor's shelving is rebuilt around its holdings roughly once every fourteen years. The remaining area comprises the Bureau of Unfinished Business's three working rooms, a scriptorium, and the Vestibule of Pending Matters, which has no door and is entered by walking purposefully toward the wall.

The floor's fabric is recorded as sound. A maintenance note of 1611, still posted, states that the east stair must not be swept during an amendment, and that this has been the rule since the incident. The note does not describe the incident. Enquiries to the Office of Fabric Notes concerning the incident have been returned stamped pending.

The Bureau of Unfinished Business

The Bureau of Unfinished Business was established on Floor 4001 by Third Concordance, Annex 9, to receive and hold those matters which were begun elsewhere in the Tower and which no other floor could close. Its founding clerk, Auditor Ivess Hale, held the post for sixty-one years and is remembered chiefly for the Hale Objection, an annotation so frequently cited that it has acquired the standing of a ruling without ever having been ratified.

The Bureau's work is transactional rather than investigative. A matter arrives, is entered in the Ledger of Omissions with a description of what it was meant to be, and is then held. Holders are assigned by rota. The Floor 909 sub-office has twice petitioned to be excluded from the rota on grounds of distance, and was twice refused, most recently by the Standing Order on the Movement of Unfinished Matters, 1490, which confirms that held matters "shall not travel; only their descriptions shall travel, and these by messenger." The same order fixes the messenger's fee at four stair tokens.

Dispute of the 1500s

Floor 4001's principal scholarly difficulty concerns the Third Concordance against the Concordance of Reversals. Third Concordance, Annex 9, holds that anything entering Floor 4001 becomes unfinished by the fact of entering. The Concordance of Reversals, Annex 2, holds with equal firmness that the property of unfinishedness attaches to the matter and not to the floor, and may follow it out. Read together, the two instruments permit a matter to be held on Floor 4001 while being, at the same time, finished elsewhere.

The conflict was sharpened by the arrival, in the winter of 1583, of a consignment of eleven held matters entered as coming from the reversal floor Floor 1117 and described, in the transfer docket, as reversed. By the Concordance of Reversals the consignment was finished and should have been released; by Annex 9 it was unfinished and could not be. It remains on the floor. It is occasionally dusted.

"The question is not what the matter is, but where it is being kept."

— Third Concordance, Annex 9, marginalia attributed to Auditor Ivess Hale

The Office of the Register declines to adjudicate between the two Concordances and has declined since 1402, on the stated ground that the register "is a record, not a court."

Floor numbering and the designation dispute

The number 4001 has been assigned to the floor four times and removed twice. It was first assigned in the Roll of Floors, lost in the Four Years of Undesignation following the Clerks' Recension of 1277, restored by the Second Recension in 1301, struck again during the confusion attending Floor 202, and restored a second time by warrant in 1466. The Nomenclature Board maintains that the current assignment is provisional; the Bureau of Unfinished Business maintains that a floor holding unfinished matters cannot itself be unfinished, and treats its address as settled. Correspondence between the two bodies on the point now fills two shelves of the floor it concerns.

Because Floor 4001 addresses through Floor 2001 — that floor's stairwell being the nearest landing with a working register — the two are frequently catalogued as a single administrative floor by careless hands. The two floors share no business. They do share a lift shaft.

Access

Visitors are admitted by appointment only and should present the appointment to the porter at the Floor 2001 landing, not to the porter on Floor 4001, who cannot leave the floor and who cannot read.