Sealed Stacks of Floor 200

Definition and scope

The Sealed Stacks of Floor 200 designate the block of reading-rooms, transfer galleries, and interstitial bins on Floor 200 that have been closed to ordinary accession since the ratification of the Fifth Concordance. The Sealing instrument is a vitreous plug laid across the principal corridor in a single pour, a technique refined on Floor 200 after earlier attempts with wax and lead proved insufficient against the ambient draft. The Sealed Stacks are held under the joint custody of the Warden of Sealed Holdings and the Warden of Ephemeral Stacks, an arrangement that has produced more correspondence than it has produced security.

Origins of the seal

The decision to seal Floor 200 was not taken lightly, nor was it taken quickly. Records held in the Sealing Floor (Floor 2,118) show the matter before the Curatorial Council on three separate occasions before any glass was poured. The first two attempts were abandoned over disagreements concerning aperture numbering; the third succeeded only because the clerk responsible for the numbering had been reassigned in the interim and no one thought to object to the new scheme.

The Vitreous Seal as applied on Floor 200 differs from that used on Floor 909 in two respects: it is thicker, and it is green. The thicker pour was ordered after a 318-day winter in which the original seal was found to have developed a hairline fracture along its northern edge. The green tint derives from the glass supplied by the Aethelred Sealed Foundry, whose furnaces at Floor 303, Aethelred Sealed Annex have supplied the Tower's sealing glass since the Paper Shortage of the Lower Stacks diverted earlier stocks elsewhere.

Contents

The holdings within the Sealed Stacks are not catalogued in the ordinary way, on the grounds that cataloguing implies a reader, and a reader implies a threshold. What survives in the partial inventories recovered before the pour is listed below.

• Transfer ledgers, Floors 196–204, unbound.
• Reading-room day-books, 1187 through 1204, water-damaged.
• A set of Corinthian Whisper-Stone specimens, quarried for Floor 303, Aethelred Sealed Annex and never collected.
• Fourteen sealed Silent Columns, subsequently identified as duplicates of those recovered during The Silent Stacks Excavation (890-Σ) and reclassified accordingly.
• An unsent letter of complaint addressed to the Office of Sealed Thresholds, concerning the treatment of Floor 200's staff during the sealing.

The last item has never been read in full, as its seal is intact and its addressee maintains that it was never received.

Disputed boundaries

A recurring point of disagreement concerns the exact extent of the Sealed Stacks. The Fifth Concordance describes them as "the principal rooms and those bins immediately adjacent," a formulation the Warden of Sealed Holdings has read expansively to include the southern lightwell, while the Warden of Ephemeral Stacks insists it reaches only to the second bin. The matter has been referred twice to The Sealing Floor and twice returned unresolved, each time with a marginal note in the same hand reading only "insufficient glass."

The southern lightwell in question serves three floors. Since the dispute began, the wardens of each have submitted separate petitions, none of which agree on the lightwell's dimensions, its purpose, or whether it exists.

Relation to adjacent holdings

Floor 200 sits in an unusual position relative to the better-known sealed and whispering holdings of the Tower. It is not part of The Pendulum Stacks, nor does it belong to the Whispering Stacks Corridor system that runs through Seventy-Second Floor. Administratively it has nonetheless been drawn into proximity with both, owing to a clerical error in the floor index that paired 200 with 72 for the better part of a century. The error was caught during the review that followed The Silent Concordance Breach, and corrected, though the corrected pairing has itself since been disputed.

Visiting hours for the Sealed Stacks are the second Tuesday of any month that has thirty-one days. The corridor outside the vitreous plug is kept swept.

Later rulings

The status of Floor 200 was revisited during the Curatorial Councilemergency Session of 345delta03, which considered whether the seal should be broken to allow the recovery of the Whisper-Stone specimens. The session ended without a ruling; the specimens remain in place, and the glass remains poured. A subsequent proposal to bore a narrow inspection channel was referred to the Office of Sealed Thresholds, which responded after fourteen months that the channel would constitute a new aperture and would therefore require its own sealing, a determination the petitioner described at the time as "conclusive and unhelpful."

The Sealed Stacks of Floor 200 are currently in a state of settled closure. No accession has been attempted since 1204. The vitreous plug shows no further fracture, and the southern lightwell continues to be a matter of record.