The Hall of Unfinished Catalogs

Definition and jurisdiction

The Hall of Unfinished Catalogs is a receiving hall on Floor 88 whose holdings consist entirely of catalogues that describe collections which have not yet been assembled. It is not to be confused with the Hall of Unfinished Catalogues, a separate office four floors above, whose holdings are catalogues that are themselves unfinished as documents — abandoned mid-entry, water-damaged, or left handless at the fourth folio. The distinction is jurisdictional rather than material, and the two halls have disputed it since the Concordance of Divided Jurisdictions was amended in the winter of 214 to say that a catalogue should be filed "according to the state of the thing it describes, and not according to the state of its own leaves."

The Hall of Unfinished Catalogs therefore holds finished documents. Each is in order, sealed, paginated, and correct. None of them describes anything that has been gathered.

Holdings and arrangement

The Hall is arranged by the anticipated size of the unassembled collection, from the small cases near the door to the great projected registers at the far end, which occupy shelving forty-one bays deep and have never been consulted in full. Among the principal holdings:

• The Provisional Register of the Unassembled Antiphonals, projected at nine hundred and six volumes, of which the register itself is the only item in existence.
• The Catalogue of the Gulf of Unfinished Syllogisms, or rather the catalogue thereof, which awaits a survey of that body of water and cannot begin until the gulf is sounded. See Gulf of Unfinished Syllogisms.
• The Reckoning of the Metacollection, held in eight copies, all concordant, all describing the same absent whole. Compare The Unfinished Metacollection.
• The Third Schedule of Charitable Bequests Not Yet Made, amended annually by a clerk who has never been informed of the schedule's purpose.

Items arrive by transfer from the Vault of Unfinished Business and, less often, by direct deposit from the Curatorium of Unfinished Likenesses, which on three recorded occasions has sent portraits of objects not yet commissioned. Portraits are returned. This is the only category of deposit the Hall refuses, and it refuses it in writing, at length, and without effect.

The Question of Floor 88

Scholars disagree as to whether the Hall's holdings constitute a holding at all. The Concordance of Substantial Holdings, Rule 6, defines a holding as "a body of things together in one place, being at least two." Under a literal reading the Hall is empty — every catalogue within it describes nothing, and a catalogue of nothing is arguably nothing catalogued. The Hall's own reading, entered in its day-book and never overturned, is that a catalogue is a thing in one place, and that its subject is a separate matter, not requiring presence. The Hall has been permitted to proceed on this reading since 288.

"A register of absent swords is a register, and lies where it is put. Let no clerk confuse the whereabouts of the list with the whereabouts of the swords."

— Third Concordance, Annex 12, Note on Presence

The Hall of Unfinished Inquiries has heard the question twice and declined to resolve it both times, routing the matter onward in the standard manner described in its own article. The most recent referral, of 411, remains in the pneumatic system. The Hall of Unfinished Catalogs has asked that it not be returned.

Access and consultation

Consultation requires the reader to state, in advance and in writing, what they expect to find. The statement is filed, not checked. In practice this has allowed the Hall to remain orderly without ever having confirmed a single prediction: of the four thousand and eleven statements filed since 290, none has been withdrawn, and no reader has been recorded as finding what they stated.

Readers are asked not to bring umbrellas onto Floor 88. The Hall's ceiling is vaulted and leaks at the north bay; the Office of the Vaulted Ceilings has scheduled repair for the year 502 and has held to that date through four revisions of the schedule.

The Clerkship of Expected Volumes

The Hall has one permanent officer, the Clerk of Expected Volumes, a post established in 190 and held without interruption since by a succession of eleven clerks whose names are recorded but whose appointment instruments are missing. The present clerk, Adjunct-Clerk Vanis Orr, assumed the post in 367 and has spent the whole of her tenure negotiating the status of the Catalogue of Unfinished Bridges, which she maintains is not a bridge between catalogues but a catalogue of bridges, and which the Social of the Unfinished Bridge maintains is neither.

The dispute is now in its forty-fourth year. Orr's grievance, filed with the Hall of Procedural Anomalies in 383, alleges that her counterparts have routed the same memorandum through her office eleven times, each time under a new seal, and that the eleventh copy arrived with the first copy's annotations still attached. The Hall of Procedural Anomalies has catalogued the grievance and taken no further step, noting in its register that the repeated routings are "procedural in character and therefore within our remit, though not, at present, within our reach."

Selected precedents

Clause 14 of the Concordance of Unfinished Works provides that a catalogue may be closed, but not completed, so long as its subject is outstanding. The Hall has accordingly closed no catalogue in its history, and expects to go on not closing them.