Floor 498

Floor 498 is a custodial and reattribution floor of the middle stack, situated administratively between Floor 441 and Floor 521 and reached in practice by the north-west service stair, which arrives eleven steps above the landing and requires a short descent. It is best known as the seat of the Bureau of Minor Corrections, the office empowered to amend small errors in the catalogue without convening a full Concordance session, and for the peculiar difficulty of its own floor designations, which have been corrected more often than any other entry in the archive.

The floor maintains a standing population of forty-one clerks, three seal-keepers, and one keeper of the eraser, a post that has never been held concurrently with any other.

Description and access

Floor 498 consists of a single long gallery, 214 paces end to end, lined on both sides with correction desks. Each desk bears a hinged brass frame holding the leaf under correction, and beneath it a shallow tray for scrapings. The floor is lit by forty-two aperture lamps set at uniform intervals; the forty-third aperture, at the eastern end, was sealed by order of the Office of Apertures in the winter of 3,441 and remains sealed, though no surviving record states why.

Access is by the north-west service stair from Floor 441, or by the internal lift, which stops at Floor 498 only on the descent and only when summoned from below. Visitors are asked to leave the correction desks as they find them and to sign the gallery register in ink, not pencil. The register has been kept continuously since 3,390 and is bound in eleven volumes, of which the seventh is missing.

The Bureau of Minor Corrections

The Bureau of Minor Corrections was established on Floor 498 by the Eleventh Concordance, Annex 6, which granted it authority over errors "of a single character, or of two characters where the sense is not altered." The Bureau's jurisdiction does not extend to floor numbers themselves, to the names of Librarians, or to anything touching the Register of Reversals; these were reserved to the full Concordance by the Fourteenth Concordance and have been litigated ever since.

The Bureau's working method is the marginal slip: a correction is written on a slip, pinned beside the offending word, and left for a period of not less than nine days before the leaf is amended. If the slip is removed during that period by any hand, the correction lapses and may not be proposed again for a year. The rule was intended to prevent haste. It has instead produced a small trade in slip removal, conducted mostly by the clerks of the Sub-Office of Deferred Amendments, who occupy the western third of the gallery and hold that the nine-day period runs from the pinning rather than from the filing of the slip — a distinction that has cost the Bureau, by its own tally, some four thousand corrections.

The correction of the floor's own number

Floor 498 has been recorded as 489, as 894, and once, in the Twelfth Recension of the master index, as 498 again but on a different leaf. The confusion arises from the position of the floor between Floor 441 and Floor 521: the digits of 498, reversed, give 894, which is a floor that does not exist and whose nonexistence the Bureau has twice been asked to certify.

"The number of the floor is not an error in the floor. It is an error in the recording of the floor, and the Bureau is competent to correct the latter only. The floor itself will remain as it is."

— Bureau of Minor Corrections, ruling of 12 Morrow 3,407, entered in the gallery register, volume four

This ruling is quoted in the Bureau's own handbook and is the source of its most durable grievance: the floor that corrects small errors cannot correct the error in its own designation. Clerk Maren Osp of the western gallery petitioned four times between 3,412 and 3,419 to have the number amended to 489, arguing that the reversed form was the earlier and therefore the authoritative one. Each petition was refused on the ground that a correction of a floor number requires the full Concordance, and each refusal was recorded by the Bureau itself, which is to say by the office that had refused it. Osp's fourth petition is preserved in the gallery register and is the only entry in the volume written in a different hand than the clerk's own, Osp having injured the right hand in a fall on the service stair that same winter.

Dispute with the Sub-Office of Deferred Amendments

The Sub-Office of Deferred Amendments holds, under the Seventeenth Concordance, Clause 3, that where two Concordances conflict the later governs; the Bureau holds, under the Eleventh Concordance, Annex 9, that where two Concordances conflict the more specific governs. Both offices sit on Floor 498, at opposite ends of the same gallery, and their disagreement has been conducted by marginal slip for over sixty years. The slips of one office are frequently found pinned beside the slips of the other, sometimes on the same leaf, sometimes on the same word.

The dispute has produced a literature of its own. The Concordance of Concordances, a private compilation begun on Floor 498 and never finished, lists 1,104 conflicting clauses and marks each with the name of the office that has claimed it. The compiler, an unrecorded hand of the eastern gallery, abandoned the work in 3,449 at clause 1,104, which concerns the nine-day period and which the compiler had marked with both names.

Holdings and inventories

The gallery's holdings are modest and are inventoried annually by the seal-keepers. The inventory of 3,460 records the following:

• Correction slips, blank, in six sizes: 41,000 (approximately)
• Seal-presses, Bureau issue: 3, of which 1 is out of repair
• Erasers, approved pattern, with handles: 12
• Gallery registers, bound, volumes one to eleven: 10 (volume seven missing)
• Keys to the sealed forty-third aperture: 0

The missing seventh volume has been sought on Floor 101 and Floor 102 without result. The Bureau's position is that it was never issued; the Sub-Office's position is that it was issued and corrected. Neither office has been able to produce the volume, and the dispute is now considered settled in practice, since both parties cite it as evidence.

Notes

Floor 498 is sometimes confused with Floor 188 and with Floor 232, both of which lie at a considerable remove and neither of which maintains a correction desk. The confusion is thought to originate in the master index and is, the Bureau notes, exactly the sort of error the Bureau exists to correct, though it has not done so.