Grand Taxonomy of Unassigned Designations

Scope and standing

The Grand Taxonomy of Unassigned Designations is an exhaustive, ever-expanding list of all authorized but unassigned floor numbers, shelf-markers, archival codes, and cross-reference tags held within the Tower. It is administered by the Curators of the Grand Taxonomy and defines its parameters through the Master Index. Its standing within the archive is unusual: it is at once a register of things that do not yet have a place and the instrument by which such things acquire one, a duality that has produced three centuries of intermittent dispute.

The Grand Taxonomy records and designates Tower years, including those designated 'Silent Pen', and sets out the status of holdings that remain Unassigned/Perpetually In Transit. It also defines Spontaneous Manifestations and Non-Pen under Clause 447.2, 'Implements of Record', the latter provision having been drafted after a dispute over whether a catalogued implement that writes without a hand should be entered under instruments or under authors.

Composition

The Taxonomy is arranged not by subject but by the form of absence each designation describes. Annex B details the use of Provisional Markers, which are applied to designations awaiting confirmation by the Administrative Taxonomy. A second annex governs Unassigned Persons, a category added after the recension of the Fourth Concordance brought several long-standing clerks under review for having no recorded appointment.

The Grand Taxonomy lists Kepler under 'proper designations of obscure origin, unassigned', an entry that has withstood two challenges, the more recent brought by the Procedural Taxonomy on the grounds that the designation had, in practice, been in use for generations and should therefore be considered assigned by usage. The Curators rejected the challenge on the basis that usage without a filed marker does not constitute assignment, and that to hold otherwise would render the entire register retrospective.

Where a designation cannot be entered on its own terms, it is routed to one of several standing annexes. The Taxonomy of Unwritten Books is an annex to the Grand Taxonomy and absorbs all entries whose subject matter is a work that has been authorized but never produced; the Annex III handles designations whose value changes depending on the direction from which they are approached. The Auditory Phantasma Taxonomy is frequently reconciled with the Grand Taxonomy, especially after the Great Re-cataloguing.

Method

The methodologies developed during the Great Taxonomy of Implied Fauna (Project GIFT) later informed the Grand Taxonomy, in particular its treatment of subjects attested only by their absence. The principle, as formulated by the Curators, is that a designation may be held open indefinitely provided the gap it marks is itself documented. Speculative Cataloguers extrapolate subjects from gaps in the Grand Taxonomy; their extrapolations are not entered into the Taxonomy but are filed alongside it, where they are consulted with growing frequency and diminishing confidence.

The Annual Audit of the Great Taxonomy reconciles these extrapolations against the register once per Tower year. Audits have historically produced a net gain of entries, a figure the Curators describe as expected and which several floors regard as a slow failure.

Disputed scope

The principal disagreement concerns whether the Grand Taxonomy is a list of designations or a list of absences. Under the reading preferred by the Administrative Taxonomy, every unassigned designation is a candidate for assignment and the register is therefore provisional by nature. Under the reading preferred by the Procedural Taxonomy, a designation that has remained unassigned for longer than a single recension has become a permanent feature of the Tower's structure, and the Taxonomy is in effect a map of fixed holes. The two readings are both cited in the Third Concordance, in annexes that contradict one another, and neither has been amended since.

A narrower dispute concerns Taxonomic Gaps that arise from the Taxonomy's own omissions rather than from the Tower's. These are recorded in a marginal hand of unknown origin, in a style the Curators of the Grand Taxonomy have declined to attribute or suppress. Their presence is the standard evidence offered by proponents of the second reading.

Handling

Copies of the Taxonomy are circulated to each floor that holds an unassigned designation. Volumes are not to be carried between floors while open; the rule was entered after a recension at a landing on the stair between two floors, where the copy was found reconciled to neither.

Where a designation is finally assigned, the entry is struck through but not removed, and the struck entry remains visible in all subsequent printings. The Curators have never stated whether this is for the record or for the designation's benefit.