Limbus Stacks

Definition and jurisdiction

Limbus Stacks is a cataloguing district of indeterminate extent, administered under protest by the Warden of Ephemeral Stacks as an attachment of the Liminal Stacks. The designation denotes holdings which have been formally withdrawn from circulation but not formally received into any repository, and which accordingly rest in a condition the Twelfth Concordance describes only as "pending the question of where." The Limbus Stacks are frequently confused with the Negative Stacks, a confusion the Census of the Whispering Stacks Body has protested four times since the recension of 884.

The district's precise floor-numbering remains unsettled. Survey returns filed between 871 and 899 place the Limbus Stacks at three different heights, with no two expeditions agreeing on the intervening stairwells. A note in the margin of the Fourth Concordance, unsigned, records the observation that "the Limbus are where the numbering gives out," which later scribes have treated as authoritative despite the absence of a seal.

History

The district accreted rather than being founded. Beginning in the winter of 856, the Clerk of Withdrawals — then one Hesper of the Annex of Revisions — found herself unable to certify a receiving floor for a consignment of damaged atlases. The atlases were not lost; they were merely not anywhere. Hesper's report, appended to the Ninth Concordance, states that she placed them "in the interim," a phrase which subsequent clerks adopted as a location.

Within twenty years, "the interim" had acquired shelves. By 879 the Limbus Stacks required their own ledger, and by 891 the ledger required its own sub-stacks. The district's growth provoked the first of the Disputes of Placement, in which the Custodians of the Stacks argued that anything not received was by definition not held, and therefore fell outside their purview. The argument was sustained by the Tenth Concordance and reversed by the Eleventh Concordance eleven months later, on the grounds that something not held could nonetheless be shelved, and shelving was itself a form of custody.

Organisation of holdings

Holdings in the Limbus Stacks are arranged not by subject but by degree of incompletion. The district recognises four grades:

• Grade alpha — withdrawn, awaiting a receiving floor. Includes most of the Stacks of Unfinished Sentences overflow.
• Grade beta — received, but by a floor that has since been renumbered.
• Grade gamma — shelved under a designation later found to be a transcription error.
• Grade delta — held in the interim, meaning no further specification has ever been filed.

Grade delta is the largest and least audited. An inventory conducted in the winter of 897 by two assistants of the Cartography of Ephemeral Stacks returned a count of "considerable" and was accepted as final.

Governance and disputes

Authority over the Limbus Stacks is contested. The Warden of Ephemeral Stacks claims the district as an extension of the Liminal Stacks; the Custodian of the Stacks maintains that the East Unbound Stacks and their dependencies retain a residual claim on anything never formally delivered. The matter was referred to the Third Concordance, whose Annex 4 is frequently cited by both parties:

"Where a thing is neither received nor refused, it is held by whichever office last touched it, unless that office has since been dissolved, in which case it is held by the office that dissolved it."

— Third Concordance, Annex 4

The clause proved durable precisely because it resolves nothing. Hesper of the Annex of Revisions, who filed the original report, dissolved her office in 862; her successor, a clerk named Ovid of the Pending Shelf, accordingly holds the entire Grade delta collection by this provision. Ovid has never contested the arrangement, a fact attributed variously to diligence and to the office being dissolved in his turn shortly after.

A minor but persistent irregularity concerns the district's relationship to the Whispering Stacks. Holdings permeating upward from the Lower Stacks have been recorded crossing into the Limbus district without filing a Movement of Stacks, and the West Lateral Stacks have twice been notified of movements they had no record of initiating.

Access

Visitors are admitted on the third day of each month between the ninth and eleventh hour, provided they arrive holding a slip issued by a floor that still exists. Slips issued by floors subsequently renumbered are honoured only if the renumbering is legible from both sides.

See also

• Liminal Stacks
• Sequestered Stacks
• Jurisprudence Stacks
• Floor 1,337, The Autonomous Stacks
• Phantom Librarian of the West Stacks