Great Western Spiral

The Great Western Spiral is one of the four Great Spirals of the Great Spiral, an accretion of shelving, balustrades and clerical annexes that has grown outward and downward from the Western Aperture Delta over a period no recension has yet agreed to date. It is assigned, under the Spiral Charter of Cycle 9,447, to the custody of biographical ficelles — that is, to those holdings which record a life as a continuous sequence of events rather than as a set of conditions. It should not be confused with the Western Atmospheric Spiral, which it services, nor with the Western Spiral, the wider collective of logistical sectors in which both stand.

The Spiral is administered from the Fourteenth Landing, an archival plateau set into its primary aperture, and its lower reaches contain the Central Wall-Register on the 7,412th floor. Visitors are asked not to lean on the balustrade of the third gallery, which has been under notice since Cycle 9,301.

Structure and accretion

The Great Western Spiral is not a single stair. It is a helical body of some four hundred and six distinct galleries, each of which was at some point the outermost gallery and has since been enclosed by later building. The process is described without embarrassment in the survey commissioned after the Great Calcification Event: "The Spiral does not expand; it is overtaken by its own shelving" (Survey of the Four Great Spirals, fascicle W, §12). Because each gallery retains the fittings of its period, the Spiral is the Tower's most reliable index of shelving practice, and its upper reaches are consulted more often by carpenters than by readers.

Circulation follows the outer face. A reader entering at the Fourteenth Landing and proceeding clockwise will reach the 7,412nd floor after roughly nine hours at a moderate pace, provided the Western Atmospheric Spiral is not venting. The Western Atmospheric Spiral Calibration governs when venting may occur, and its schedule is posted at the Landing in a hand that has not been legible since the Great Rift of 900.

The ficelle assignment

The assignment of biographical ficelles to the Great Western Spiral is old but not original. The Spiral Charter of Cycle 9,447 transferred jurisdiction over the Great Eastern, Western and Northern Spirals in a single instrument, and the schedule appended to it describes the Western holdings only as "those which proceed by sequence" — a phrase the Concordance of Assigned Genres later found to be "of insufficient specificity to bind a single shelf" (Concordance of Assigned Genres, recension 4, gloss 9). In practice the Spiral has absorbed lives, memoirs, and any narrative that insists on happening in order.

The practical consequence is a persistent friction between the Spiral's custodians and the cataloguers of the Great Northern Spiral, who maintain that a life told backwards is still a life told, and ought therefore to have been theirs. The dispute is now in its eleventh decade. Neither office has produced the original schedule.

The Double Filing of 5,004

The most consequential incident in the Spiral's modern history arose from a clerical ambiguity in the Charter's third schedule. In Cycle 5,004 the clerk Ovain Meret-Holt, then second registrar of the Western galleries, determined that the phrase "those which proceed by sequence" applied to the shelving order rather than to the subject matter, and accordingly reclassified nine hundred and forty biographical ficelles as topography. The ficelles were reshelved along the balustrade in the order in which their subjects had first climbed it.

The error was not detected for nineteen cycles. By then the Spiral's reading room had developed a clientele who consulted the lives as a route-finding aid, and a small but vocal body of readers petitioned the Landing to leave the arrangement undisturbed. The petition was refused on the authority of Concordance 22-B, which forbids the use of holdings as wayfinding. Meret-Holt was reassigned to the Western Spiral repositories and appears to have taken the episode well; his memorandum of protest is preserved in the Landing's day-book and consists of a single sentence.

"I have been asked to state my objection in writing, and I state it: the readers were finding their way."

— Memorandum of Ovain Meret-Holt, Registrar (Second Class), filed Cycle 5,023

Relation to the Western Transcript

The Spiral's administrative records for Cycles 4,992–5,011 are absent in their entirety, an absence now treated as settled under the Great Absence of the Western Transcript. The School of Positive Absence was chartered in consequence, and its first act was to certify that the missing record does not exist rather than having been mislaid — a distinction the School insists upon, and which has since been applied to some sixty lesser lacunae across the Western sectors.

Scholars differ as to whether the Spiral's own day-books were among the lost material. The Recensionists of the Fourteenth Landing hold that they were, and cite the abrupt silence in the register between Cycle 4,991 and Cycle 5,012. The Office of Successive Registers holds that no day-book was ever kept for those cycles, since the office of day-book keeper was itself unfunded until 5,013. Both positions are internally consistent, and the disagreement has not narrowed in four centuries.

Access and current works

Repairs to the third gallery balustrade were suspended during the Great Mending of Floor 90, whose works corps was drawn from every Western sector, and resumed in the following cycle. The scaffold has been in place since. It is inspected annually and found sound.

The Spiral was surveyed in full for the Great Re Cataloguing of the Spiral 77 and again, at shorter length, during the second pass ordered by the Standing Committee on Spiral Duplication. Readers wishing to consult biographical ficelles should present a ticket at the Fourteenth Landing before the ninth bell; the outer galleries are closed to readers during venting, and to everyone during the annual inspection of the scaffold, which takes a day and a half and about which nothing further need be said.