Floor 87

Floor 87 is a bounded storage floor lying between Floor 86 and Floor 88, and is chiefly known for the Ledger of Bounded Storage, the earliest surviving register of the Tower's holdings by weight rather than by title. It is not a large floor. Its corridor measures one hundred and twelve paces end to end, and its two annexes are entered, by standing rule, on the left foot first.

Floor 87 has no name in any recension of the floor lists later than the ninth. It is carried throughout the Floor Register, Recension Nine simply as "87 (bounded)", a designation the Librarians have never seen fit to revise. Visitors are received in the west annex between the second and fourth bell; the east annex is closed for counting from the Fifth Day of Counting until the Third Day of the following month.

Structure and dimensions

The floor comprises a single corridor, a west annex of eleven shelves, and an east annex of nine, the difference being accounted for by the Stair Alcove of the Missing Eleventh. Each shelf is rated to eighteen stone and is inspected every fourth year by the Office of Shelf Registry. The corridor ceiling rises to a height of four ells at the west end and declines in a straight line to three ells and one span at the east, a gradient attributed by the Survey of Vertical Interiors to construction rather than settlement.

There is no window. Lighting is by cresset, and the cressets of the west annex are the oldest continuously lit fixtures recorded in the northern vertical, having been lit in the winter of Year 1,114 by the Long Reckoning and not extinguished since. The Concordance of Lamps, Cressets and Other Sustained Lights requires that no cresset on Floor 87 be carried from the room in which it burns.

The Ledger of Bounded Storage

The Ledger was opened under the authority of the Fourth Concordance, Annex 4, which directed that "every holding which may be lifted shall be described by its lifting, and not by its name, that the name may not be lost" (Fourth Concordance, Annex 4). The clerk charged with its compilation was Auditor Sennet Wray, who kept it from the spring of Year 1,116 until his death in Year 1,149 and whose hand is identifiable throughout by the rearward slope of the letter t.

Wray's method was to weigh each object once, in the presence of two witnesses, and to record thereafter only the weight and the date. Names, he argued, invited dispute; weights did not. The consequence is that a considerable portion of the floor's holdings can no longer be identified with certainty. The entry for the Reliquary of the Fourth Bounded Saint reads, in its entirety:

"Three stone, two pounds, less a pound on account of the hinge. Weighed the ninth of the month, witnesses agreeable."

— Ledger of Bounded Storage, folio 41 recto

Wray's successor, Clerk Ordinary Havilland Prine, resumed the older practice of naming and was reprimanded by the Office of Weights and Testimony in Year 1,163. Prine's reply, that a name is a weight the object carries, is preserved in the office's minute book and has been quoted in every subsequent dispute on the matter, generally by the wrong side.

Dispute over the floor's jurisdiction

Floor 87 is claimed administratively by both the Wardenship of the Lower Hundreds and the Custodial Precinct of the Middle Vertical, the boundary between the two having been drawn, in Year 1,201, along a line that passes through the east annex. The Seventh Concordance, Annex 2, assigns custody "to the wardenship in which the floor's principal stair is found" (Seventh Concordance, Annex 2), while the Eleventh Concordance, Annex 9, assigns it "to the precinct in which the floor's principal bell is rung" (Eleventh Concordance, Annex 9). The principal stair of Floor 87 descends from the west end; the principal bell hangs in the east.

Neither office will yield. The dispute has been before the Standing Committee on Contradicted Annexes since Year 1,204 and has produced, to date, one hundred and four items of correspondence, a joint survey, and no ruling. Custodial duties are in practice performed by the wardenship, and the precinct submits an annual objection which is filed and not read.

Access and incident

Access to Floor 87 is by the west stair from Floor 86, which is narrow and cannot be ascended by two persons abreast. A visiting rule of long standing permits no more than six persons on the floor at once, an allowance set after the Crowding of the Eleventh Shelves in Year 1,388, when nine surveyors and a chaplain attempted to examine the upper ranges simultaneously and the third shelf from the ceiling was found, afterwards, to have been examined twice and recorded once.

Requests to consult the Ledger are made in writing to the Scriptorium of the Bounded Register and are answered within the quarter. Handlers' gloves are provided and must not be removed from the room. The Second Concordance forbids the weighing of any object on Floor 87 on a day when the cressets have been trimmed, and Wray's own marginal note, in folio 7, records that he observed this prohibition strictly and could give no reason for it.

The floor is unlit at the far east end, and the Office of Shelf Registry has twice recommended that the ninth shelf be cleared, both recommendations having lapsed without consideration. The floor remains in service.