The Liminal Gallery

Definition and Jurisdiction

The Liminal Gallery is a nine-bay exhibition arcade situated at the eastern terminus of the Liminal Shelf, at the point where the shelf-runs give way to the ordinary fixed shelving of the floors immediately surrounding the Liminal Stacks. It is not a gallery in the sense of the Gallery of Partial Weaves or the Shifting Gallery — nothing in it is displayed for viewing, and no viewing is scheduled. It is instead the threshold room of the transitional archive: the place through which objects, and occasionally persons, are recorded as passing on their way into or out of the The Liminal Reservoir without ever being held there.

Administratively the Liminal Gallery falls under the Liminal Scriptorium on Floor 506, which classifies it as "annex, unmetered" in the running inventory of the Liminal Stacks. The baying of unmetered annexes is a known irritant to the Guild of Liminal Masons, who have twice petitioned to have the Gallery surveyed. Both petitions were returned unopened on the grounds that a gallery in transition cannot be surveyed without being fixed, and Archivist-Loremaster Valerius has observed in writing that surveying it would constitute a category of vandalism.

Architecture and the Nine Bays

The Gallery is entered from the west through the eighth run of the Liminal Shelf and exits at the east into fixed shelving that belongs, depending on the hour of the week, to either Floor 503 or Floor 509. The discrepancy is not a fault. Since the entry of Concordance on the Indeterminate Terminus (Delta-6) it has been accepted that the Liminal Gallery opens at both ends onto floors that are not, strictly speaking, the same floor on both visits, and that this is a property of the Gallery and not of the floor.

Each bay is vaulted in shell-ash plaster and lit by a single alabaster lantern on an iron chain. The lanterns are trimmed on the ninth day of each month by an attendant from the Office of Lamps and Louvres; they are not lit otherwise. The bays are left empty by convention, and the convention is enforced: benches were introduced in the winter of 880 and removed within a week following the complaint of Clerk-Amanuensis Ottiline Vask, who reported that an object left on a bench in the third bay had acquired a history before morning, and that the history was not its own.

The Registry of Impressions

Because nothing may be held in the Gallery, the Atelier of Permanent Impressions maintains there a ledger known as the Registry of Impressions, in which is entered every object that crosses from the Liminal Stacks into fixed shelving, or from fixed shelving into the Stacks, together with a description, the hour of passage, and the witnessing clerk's mark. The Registry runs to one hundred and eight folio volumes and has been maintained continuously since the Second Recension of the Atelier.

The Registry is the only record in the Tower that documents passage rather than presence, and it is for this reason heavily cited in disputes over provenance. Its authority is nonetheless limited. The Whispering Gallery Procedural of the same year directs that no entry in the Registry may be used to prove an object's destination, only its departure, a rule that has caused difficulty in the case of objects that depart twice.

"An impression is evidence of a transaction, not of a thing. Where the Registry speaks of an object's arrival, it speaks of the arrival of the impression, and the object is to be sought elsewhere."

— Whispering Gallery Procedural, Annex 3

The Dispute over Bay Five

The fifth bay is irregular in a way that has been studied without resolution since the measurements of Auditor Perec Halloway in 861. Halloway recorded the bay's interior as seven paces by five. A second measurement in 862 gave five paces by seven. A third, conducted by Halloway himself and witnessed by two clerks of the Scriptorium, gave no dimension at all, and Halloway declined to sign it.

The Concordances are divided on the matter. The Concordance on the Indeterminate Terminus, Annex 2, holds that the bay is a single bay whose dimensions are governed by the direction of approach, and that both measurements are correct in their own terms. The Fourth Concordance, on the other hand, holds that there are two fifth bays, and forbids the keeping of a third. The Scriptorium has never resolved the point, and the inventory of Floor 506 accordingly lists the bay as "five, or five and six, as the case requires." Visiting surveyors are asked not to walk its perimeter twice.

Incidents

The most discussed incident in the Gallery's record occurred during the winter of 903, when a consignment of Purgatorial Wax bound for the Barometric Gallery was delayed in the fourth bay for nineteen days. The delay itself was unremarkable; what occasioned the subsequent inquiry was the discovery, at unloading, that the wax had acquired forty-one impressions of objects not in the consignment, all of them legible, and none of them recorded in the Registry. The Office of Lamps and Louvres attributed the impressions to the lanterns. The Atelier of Permanent Impressions attributed them to the Gallery. Neither office would accept the other's finding, and the wax was eventually catalogued in place, where it remains, at the Gallery of Unacknowledged Receipts.

A smaller matter is recorded in the same year: the Gallery's east door was found to open onto the Gallery of Receding Perspectives on four consecutive mornings in the month of March, and on the fifth morning onto its usual shelving, and the clerk who had been posted to watch it was reprimanded for leaving his post. He had not left his post. He had, as the reprimand notes drily, been standing in it.

Access and Practice

Access to the Liminal Gallery is unrestricted between the sixth and ninth bells. Between the ninth and sixth it is unrestricted also, but the Registry is closed, and passages made in that interval are entered retroactively on the next opening, in a hand that the Scriptorium does not ask the witnessing clerk to identify.

Before entering, the visitor is required to surrender all keys to the attendant at the western threshold, and to reclaim them from the eastern threshold if the Gallery permits, from the western if it does not. The requirement is set out in the Standing Orders of the Scriptorium, Order 14, and has been in force since the Ordinance of the Unlatched Door. Under the same Order, no visitor may be counted twice in a single day, and a visitor who believes he has been counted twice should present himself at the Scriptorium and not at the Gallery.