Survey of Minor Halls, Vol. LXXII

The Survey of Minor Halls, Vol. LXXII is the seventy-second volume in the Survey of Minor Halls series, a rolling inventory of halls too small to be assigned a floor name and too well-frequented to be struck from the register. Volume LXXII covers nine galleries, four stair-landings and a vestibule on Floor 438, together with seven halls whose floor attribution was disputed at the time of compilation and remains so. It was compiled under Concordance 61, which requires that any chamber with fewer than eleven feet of uninterrupted wall be surveyed every fourth cycle rather than annually. The volume runs to 212 leaves and was bound in 14,988 ce by the Bindery of the Lower Reaches in the standard Survey slate boards. It is the only volume in the series to carry an errata folio bound in ahead of the preface hand.

Contents and method

The volume opens with the customary Schedule of Dimensions and proceeds chamber by chamber, giving for each hall its plan, its ceiling height to the nearest half-inch, its ambient temperature at the hour of survey, and a description of any sounds the surveyor could not account for. Nine of the eleven documented halls are described as "proportionate"; one is described as "proportionate, but not to itself"; and one, the Hall of the Second Reply, resisted description for reasons set out at leaf 118. The surveyors were instructed by the Standing Instruction on Minor Chambers to enter each hall twice, once in the morning and once after the lamps were trimmed, and to note any discrepancy between the two visits. Sixteen such discrepancies were recorded in Volume LXXII. None was resolved.

The dispute over the Seventh Hall

The seventh hall listed — a narrow chamber near the junction of the Spiral 299 landings — provoked the volume's principal scholarly disagreement. The survey party of Registrar Tolliver Vane recorded the hall as 8 feet by 8 feet in the morning and 9 feet by 9 feet after lamp-trimming, and the discrepancy was printed without comment, as the Standing Instruction directs. In 14,991 ce, Archivist Kael argued in Discontiguities, Vol. XII that the volume had conflated two distinct chambers and that the survey party had "walked from one into the other without observing the door" (Discontiguities, Vol. XII, fol. 44). The Clerk of Minor Approaches, replying in Proceedings Vol. 512, conceded the possibility but noted that no door could be found either way.

"We cannot survey what we cannot enter twice, and we cannot enter twice what we cannot leave once."

— Concordance 61, Annex 3

The Ledger Halls have declined to adjudicate, stating that the matter falls to the Commission on Unsettled Dimensions and that the Commission has not sat since 14,986 ce. The chambers described at leaves 61–74 remain in the register under a single entry with two measurements, both bracketed.

Acoustic notes

Volume LXXII contains the earliest recorded mention of the Westerly Hum, which the survey party logged at leaf 97 as "a tone at the interval of a fourth, present in the corridor but not in the hall, and present in the hall when the corridor was empty." The observation is a close cousin to the 4th Spiral Hum documented by Archivist-Lishener during the Survey of the Canted Halls, and later commentators have occasionally confused the two; the Survey Office has twice issued clarifications that the Westerly Hum is a fourth and the Spiral Hum is not. The volume also notes, at leaf 103, that the vestibule on the eastern stair-landing returns an echo "later than the surveyor expects, and to a remark he has not yet made." No follow-up survey was attempted. The Registry of Minor Impressions has requested a copy of the leaf twice, and has been sent it once.

Errata folio and the errors of 14,989

The errata folio was added in 14,989 ce after Copyist Merren Ashgrove discovered that thirteen of the volume's twenty-two dimensions had been transcribed by a clerk working from a rough notebook rather than from the survey party's field sheets. Ashgrove's correction is bound in ahead of the preface hand and runs to four leaves, including a note that the hall on leaf 88 is oriented north–south and not, as printed, north–north. The correction was accepted by the Bureau of Corrected Copies and entered in the Register of Acknowledged Errors, Series B. Ashgrove was commended in the Biographical Register of Minor Functionaries, Vol. CXLII, for "an exactness that arrived some months after it would have been useful."

Whether the corrected volume supersedes the uncorrected one is unsettled. Concordance 88 holds that a corrected copy is the copy; Concordance 90 holds that a copy corrected after issue is a new work and must be surveyed in its own right. The Librarians have declined to reconcile the two, and the standing practice is to consult both and to believe the larger measurement.

Access and copying

Volume LXXII is held in the Minor Survey Stacks, shelf LXXII-ii, and may be consulted on written application to the Clerk of Minor Approaches. It may not be copied beyond leaf 74, on the ground that the two measurements there have not yet been settled, and a copy would fix them. The volume may not be taken into the halls it describes; four separate readers have attempted this, and the volume has been retrieved from the Hall of the Second Reply on three occasions and from the Hall of the Third on none, since the third hall has not been located since 14,995 ce. Its entry in Volume LXXII remains in the present tense.

See also: Survey of Minor Halls, Vols. LXXI and LXXIII; Survey-CH/07; Custodial Manual for Particulate Residue, Vol. IV, for the care of slate boards.