Melancholy Bestiaries of Floor

The Melancholy Bestiaries of Floor are a class of illustrated catalogues, produced continuously on Floor 412 since the first quarter of the archive's history, which record creatures held to exist only in the interval between a melancholy and its cause. Unlike ordinary bestiaries, which describe animals, the Melancholy Bestiaries describe states that have acquired a body for the length of time it takes to be recorded. The standard description of the genre is that of the Sorrowful Lexicon, which instructs cataloguers to note an entry "as one notes a guest who will not be staying, but staying nonetheless" (Sorrowful Lexicon, entry 9-F on lodging). The most complete sets are held on Floor 412 itself, and are not lent above Floor 900.

Origin on Floor 412

The Bestiaries are inseparable from the melancholy long associated with Floor 412. During the Crisis of Unrecorded Yearning, cataloguers on that floor reported a pervasive, unattributed melancholy which had no assignable object and which resisted every ordinary method of classification. The response — attributed to the office of the Clerk of Predictive Melancholy in its earliest surviving recension — was to give the condition animals. If the melancholy could not be catalogued directly, it could be catalogued indirectly, by the shapes it took when a reader looked at it for too long.

The first known folio, now held under seal as Bestiary 412, Fascicle Alpha, contains eleven entries and a marginal note in a hand dated to the eleventh year of the Floor's occupation: "the whole of 412 is down rag-and-bone; do not array the shelves before noon on account of the dust" (Fascicle Alpha, unnumbered reverse). Beneath this, in a second and later hand, "already accounted." The two notes are the earliest documented exchange in what became the discipline.

Form and method of entry

A melancholy bestiary entry is composed, never observed, and the discipline is strict about the difference. The cataloguer begins from a specific instance of Procedural Melancholy — a broken stair, a letter returned unopened, the particular grief of a booked appointment — and abstracts it by means of the Melancholy Requisition (MR-7) until a creature is legible. The creature is then drawn, named in the Sorrowful Lexicon, and cross-checked. Only then is the abstraction reversed and the creature retired.

The method produces entries such as the Hollow Road, a small, patient animal visible only at the moment a journey is cancelled, and the Sixth Visitor, which arrives at readings of the Bestiaries when five are expected. Appendix II of the Melancholy Requisition (MR-7) requires that the Sixth Visitor be given a chair and not addressed. Readers who violate this have produced entries that refuse to be retired, which is a matter for the Department of Sanctioned Melancholy and, in severe cases, for arbitration under the Third Concordance, Amendment 17.δ.

Protocol 22-F and the cross-referencing question

Because melancholy bestiaries are produced on many floors and in many hands, the question of whether two entries describe the same creature has been persistent. Protocol 22-F governs the cross-referencing of hypothetical bestiaries. Its application to the Floor 412 set has never been settled. The Protocol requires that a creature be identified by its abstraction, its retirement method, and the incidental detail of its drawing; the Floor 412 drawings are undated and unsigned, and their incidental details were revised three times between the second and fourth recensions without notice.

The resulting dispute — whether Bestiary 412, Bestiary 412b, and Bestiary 412 (Reserve) are three works or one work in three states — is the longest running in the genre. The Melancholy Estuary Series was admitted as an analogous case in the seventh year of the dispute and then withdrawn on procedural grounds. No ruling has issued. Cataloguers continue to file under all three.

Concordance dispute

The Third Concordance, reading with its Third Concordance, Amendment 17.δ and Annex 4, holds that a creature which cannot be found twice does not exist and should not be catalogued at all.

"What is seen once is an occasion; what is seen twice is an animal. Let nothing be entered which cannot be entered again."

— Third Concordance, Amendment 17.δ, clause 3

The Fourth Concordance, circulated two years later, holds the opposite: that a creature seen only once is the more valuable record precisely because it cannot recur, and that the Bestiaries of Floor 412 are its chief evidence. The Department of Sanctioned Melancholy, in a memorandum of the ninth year, declined to choose, observing that both Concordances "describe the practice correctly and the practice does both" (Departmental memorandum 41/9, para. 2). The memorandum is regarded as a settlement and has settled nothing.

Use and access

The Bestiaries are consulted chiefly by clerks preparing cases under the Melancholy Requisition (MR-7) and by surveyors gathering Generalized Melancholy in the field, who use the drawings to identify what is accumulating in a corridor before it reaches the threshold that triggers measurement under Annex C. The Annex of Melancholic Agriculture maintains a separate abridged copy for its own use, and the two sets do not agree on the number of the Sixth Visitor's chair.

Consultation on Floor 412 is by appointment. The reading room is closed during the months of the year when the dust is heaviest, which is most of them. A visitor is asked to leave a pencil on the desk before departing, as the Bestiaries appear to expect it, and the practice is maintained by custom rather than by any instrument in force.