Gutterwell Folios (Floor 88, "The Sump")

Definition and designation

The Gutterwell Folios are a bound corpus of eleven recensions held on Floor 88, a floor whose registered name, The Sump, is a source of chronic confusion with The Sump on Floor 666 and with the Oblivion Sump of Floor 5017. Floor 88 is not, and has never been, a sump. It is a shallow stone channel running the length of the eastern reading gallery, cut to a uniform depth of one hand's breadth, into which the chapter's damaged folios were for two centuries permitted to drain before rebinding. The name survives the practice. The practice survives the name. The Folios survive both, and are the only part of Floor 88 that anyone outside the floor has ever wished to consult.

The corpus consists of pages that were water-damaged, hung to dry on the gallery screen, and rebound in the order in which they happened to be taken down. That order is not the order in which they were written, nor the order in which they are numbered. It is, the floor maintains, the order in which they are meant to be read. A note pasted inside the front board of the first recension reads, in a hand dated Year 189:

"The gutter is not a filing cabinet. It is a mouth. What comes out of it comes out in the order it was swallowed and will not be swallowed again."

— attributed to Librarian Ossick Vane, Prefect of Floor 88, Year 189

Physical description

The eleven recensions are distinguishable by the number of leaves stitched between each surviving page. Recension I was bound with four blank leaves per page, a measure against further seepage; by Recension IV the blanks had been reduced to one, and by Recension IX abandoned altogether on the grounds that they "encouraged the damp to think it had room." Recension XI, the working copy in daily use, is bound in a pressed reed board of the kind used for the lower stacks' tide-tables and smells faintly of it.

No two recensions preserve the same pages. A page lost from Recension III is frequently present in Recension VII; a page present in every recension is, by Floor 88's own reckoning, suspect of having been copied rather than drained. The current inventory of pages common to all eleven is:

• the preface to the Table of Shallow Waters, lacking its final sentence;
• a list of fiacre fares, dated Year 203, of no discernible connection to the corpus;
• a page of marginalia signed only "the second reader";
• the colophon, repeated identically in every recension, including the phrase "here ends what the gutter returned."

The Floor 88 drainage audit and the Vane grievance

In the winter of Year 232 the chamber was closed for a drainage audit and the channel relined in quarried slate. The relining altered the floor's slope by two degrees, and the first folios returned after the works came back in an order that the Prefect at the time, Librarian Ossick Vane, declared "not merely new but impertinent." Vane's grievance, filed with the Standing Committee on Stack Humidity and never closed, argues that the corpus is not a body of text but a register of the channel's own temperament, and that to alter the channel is to alter the evidence. The Committee's reply, entered on the same docket four years later, concedes the principle and denies the remedy, observing that the channel cannot be permitted to slope at its old angle because water then entered the bindery.

Vane's supporters point out that the bindery was moved in Year 240 and no longer occupies the affected space. The Committee has not revisited the matter. A separate petition, filed by the Archivist of Unbound Folios in Year 244, seeks to have the Gutterwell Folios reclassified as unbound material on the grounds that a corpus which will not hold still is not a book; it was referred to the drafters of the Ninth Concordance and has not been heard of since.

Relationship to other folio-corpora

Because the Folios share the sump designation, they are frequently collated in error with material held at the Sump of First Want and with the Condensation Folios, whose pages are recovered by the reverse process — gathered from ceilings and undersides rather than drained from floors. The two corpora were formally separated by a note of the Primary Guild in Year 258, which states without elaboration that "a thing gathered is not a thing drained, and the Guild will not have the two shelves confused again."

The Folios are sometimes compared to the Negative Folios, though the comparison is superficial: the Negative Folios invert their contents, whereas the Gutterwell Folios merely arrive in an inconvenient sequence. Möbius material has never been found on Floor 88, a fact the floor records with a certain pride, noting that its drainage "goes out and does not come back."

Use and prohibition

The Folios may be consulted on written application to the Prefecture of Floor 88, provided the applicant does not request them in numbered order. Requests so framed are returned unstamped, with no explanation beyond the prefectural seal. The rule was made explicit not by ordinance but by a ruling of the Third Concordance's annex on reading sequences, §88(d), which provides that "a reader who asks for page one first has misunderstood the floor and should be sent to a different one."

Readers are asked to leave the gallery screen closed. The channel is inspected each tenth day and emptied of silt; nothing recovered from it is added to any recension without the Prefect's countersignature, a precaution introduced after a Year 271 incident in which a boot-lace was bound into Recension VI and lay undiscovered for four years.