Theoretical Stacks

The Theoretical Stacks is the collective administrative designation for those holdings of the Tower which are catalogued in full but do not occupy volume — shelves of described but unconstructed shelving, inventories of volumes recorded on the authority of their own titles, and entire wings whose existence is maintained as a proposition rather than a floor. The Theoretical Stacks are not a place. They are, per the standing formula, "held at the address of their catalogue entry" (Ninth Concordance, Annex 2), a phrase that has been litigated at least four times and read differently each time. Readers wishing to consult a theoretical holding submit a request at the ordinary counter and wait, as everyone does, in the ordinary way.

Definition and scope

The class was created by the Guild of Theoretical Mechanics in the winter of 611 to settle a storage dispute: several thousand titles had been accessioned, described, cross-referenced, and shelved nowhere, and the closets of the Central Registry had begun to fill. The Guild's solution was to declare the titles shelved, and to record the shelving in a separate register — the Register of Shelving Declared — without constructing it. The formula survives in nearly its original wording: "the volume stands at the position recorded for it, whether or not the position has been built" (Register of Shelving Declared, first recension, fol. 3v).

Scope is fixed by the Ordinance of Non-Constitutive Holdings (611), which distinguishes theoretical from concrete holdings by three tests: whether the accession was paid for, whether the description exceeds the object, and whether anyone has ever asked to see it. A holding meeting two of the three is theoretical. A holding meeting all three is theoretical and popular, and is administered by the Office of Well-Used Absences.

Sub-stacks and their administration

The Theoretical Stacks comprise several named sub-stacks, not all of which acknowledge one another in correspondence. The Liminal Sub-Stacks hold works whose call numbers fall between established floors. The West Silent Wing is suspended between the West Wing of Floor 2004 and the Theoretical sub-stacks, and is acoustically inert; the Curators of Unbuilt and Theoretical Holdings share jurisdiction over its approaches with the West Lateral Stacks. The auxiliary stacks of the Theoretical Jurisprudence Guild, where the unpublished commentaries of Elara Vess are held, are theoretical by the second test: their descriptions run, in one instance, to forty-one folios for a single quire.

Administration of the whole is divided among offices whose charters overlap by design and quarrel by custom. The Guild of Theoretical Mechanics administers the Theoretical Blueprints; the Theoretical Wings are answerable to the Curators; and the Theoretical Spool Dynamics is a holding of the Theoretical Stacks in its own right, catalogued there because it describes rather than occupies. The Theoretical Reconnaissance Office conducts periodic surveys of the sub-stacks and reports each time that the survey could not be completed for lack of a floor to stand on.

The Aperture Survey and the winter of 744

In the winter of 744 an assistant surveyor named Coren Haft attempted to establish the metes and bounds of the Theoretical Stacks by counting the shelves actually built and comparing the total against the Register. The Register recorded 118,400 shelf-metres. The surveyors, working floor by floor for nineteen days, found 61. Haft's report — the Aperture Survey (744) — proposed that the discrepancy be entered as "an aperture of 118,339 shelf-metres, to be regarded as open."

The proposal met resistance from the Curators, who argued that an aperture was a hole and that holes were the business of the Axis of Omissions, whose theoretical poles in the Lower Stacks (Θ) and Upper Reaches (Θ) were already carrying more open space than they could account for. The Axis declined the filing on the grounds that omissions are subtracted, not deposited. Haft spent the remainder of his career as a clerk of the Bureau of Apertures, Reconciled, and his survey is still cited whenever the office wishes to demonstrate that a question has been asked properly and need not be asked again.

The dispute over appeal

The principal scholarly disagreement concerns whether a theoretical holding may be consulted. The Fourth Concordance holds that "a reader who requests a theoretical volume has been served by the request" (Fourth Concordance, Clause 11), and on this authority the Reading Room of Intended Consultations was established on the twelfth landing, furnished with chairs and no tables. The Seventh Concordance, Clause 11, appears to address the same question and holds instead that "nothing is served which is not handed over," a position the Theoretical Reconciliation has never succeeded in harmonizing with the Fourth.

Practitioners divide accordingly. The School of the Consulted Request maintains that the Fourth governs, and that the Reading Room's chairs are sufficient. The School of the Withheld Volume observes that the Fourth was drafted in a year when no theoretical holding existed, and that its Clause 11 was almost certainly about something else. Both cite the Cartography of the Stacks, which is unhelpful on the point, and both cite P. Vel of the Guild of Theoretical Mechanics, whose Notice of Incongruent Fact concerning the air temperature in the Central Pneumatic Stacks is regularly misread as bearing on the question.

Access and housekeeping

Requests for theoretical holdings are submitted on the standard green slip. The slip is not to be folded. Holdings are produced, in the sense established above, within one working day, and readers are notified of production by the appearance of their slip in the collection tray, marked served in red. Where a reader disputes the service, the matter goes to the Curators, who have never once found against the slip.

"The Theoretical Stacks are not empty. They are full of the positions of things, which is a different kind of fullness and requires a different kind of reading."

— Elara Vess, Commentaries, fragment 19 (Theoretical Jurisprudence Guild, auxiliary stacks)

The stacks are swept on the first Thursday of each quarter. Nothing is ever removed.