Librarians of Floor 45

The Librarians of Floor 45 are the permanent staff charged with the custody, measurement and re-measurement of Floor 45, a narrow annular gallery of 214 running metres whose sole holdings are shelves of empty catalogue boxes. The floor is administered as a dependency of the Librarians' Chamber of Review, to which its senior officer reports quarterly, and its staff establishment is fixed at nine: seven cataloguers, one measurer, and one clerk of the boxes. The Librarians of Floor 45 hold no collection and catalogue no subject. Their function, as defined in Concordance 12, Annex 2, is "the maintenance of the possibility of holdings on a floor that has none."

The empty boxes

Floor 45 was assigned its present character in the winter of the year recorded as 3,112 by the Librarians' recorded chronology, when a consignment of 11,400 catalogue boxes intended for Floor 947 was misdirected by a stairhead porter and shelved on 45 before the error was noticed. The boxes were returned. The shelves were not. By the time the misdirection was traced, the floor had acquired a designation, a staff of two, and a running inventory, and the Librarians' Adjudicatory Panel ruled on 4 Ventose 3,114 that a floor which had once held boxes and no longer held them was not the same as a floor which had never held them, and must therefore be staffed.

The inventory of the empty boxes is the floor's principal record. Each of the 214 metres of shelving carries a plate; each plate is checked at the start of every shift and again at the end, and the two readings are compared by the measurer. A box is recorded as present, absent, or expected. The third category was introduced in 3,409 to describe a box that has never existed but whose absence has been noted so often that the shelf has acquired a customary gap. There are currently sixty-one expected boxes on Floor 45. They are dusted.

Dispute over the count

The floor's records are not in agreement as to how many boxes have passed through it. The figure of 11,400 derives from the porter's waybill, which survived. The figure of 11,388 derives from the receiving tally kept by the floor's first clerk, Clerk Amaranth Vey, who counted the consignment twice and was dissuaded from a third count by her physician. The difference of twelve is the subject of the longest-running annotation in the floor's register, now in its fourteenth hand.

"The twelve are not missing. They were never sent. The waybill covers what left the stairhead, not what was made."

— Concordance 12, Annex 2, marginal note in the hand of the Clerk of the Boxes, 3,388

This reading is rejected by the Contradiction Librarians, who observe that Concordance 12 is itself amended by Concordance 12 and that Annex 2 has been struck and reinstated four times. Their position, filed on Floor 45 in 4,002 and never withdrawn, is that the twelve boxes exist, are on the floor, and are simply not on the shelves. A search conducted under that head in 4,017 examined the gallery, the two landings, and the underside of the shelving, and reported nothing. The report is filed in one of the boxes.

Staff and the office of the measurer

The measurer of Floor 45 holds the only post on the floor requiring a qualification, namely the Certificate of Intrinsic Numeration, which no member of the present staff has obtained. The post has been filled since 3,951 by Under-Measurer Pell Anselm, who acts in a capacity described in the establishment schedule as "provisional and indefinite." Anselm's measurements of the gallery have returned 214 metres on every occasion but two; on both occasions the gallery measured 213. The discrepancy is attributed to the fifth landing, which shortens in cold weather. Floor 45 is not heated. The matter was referred to the Librarians of Floor 116, who declined jurisdiction on the ground that they measure subjects and not architecture.

The floor's staff are drawn, by custom rather than rule, from among Librarians who have served a full rotation on Floor 17,443 and request a quieter posting. The request is granted in most cases. Requests to leave Floor 45 are granted in none, a practice upheld in 3,866 by the Librarians' Chamber of Review on the reasoning that the floor's establishment is fixed and that a departure would leave a box unguarded.

The ladder prohibition

The upper shelves of the gallery, above the fourth course, cannot be reached from the floor. They are reached by ladder, and the ladder on Floor 45 is kept chained to the fifth landing. It has not been unchained since 3,904, when a cataloguer ascended to the top course, reported that the boxes there were present, and was unable to descend for the remainder of the shift. The ladder is inspected annually and is reported sound.

Status and later rulings

Floor 45 is not listed among the floors administered directly by the Librarians and is not among those governed by a rotating committee. It appears instead in the register of floors held "in expectation," a category it shares with Floor 1 and with no other floor. Proposals to reclassify it as an ordinary floor have been made eleven times. Each has failed at the same point: a floor classified as ordinary must hold something, and no one has been able to say what Floor 45 holds. The Senior Librarians have twice declined to settle the question, noting in 4,108 that "the floor's holdings are the floor."

The most recent amendment to the floor's standing instructions, issued by the Chamber of Review in 4,190, is a single line: visitors may not bring boxes onto Floor 45. It is posted at both landings.