LAYER · 2 · WIKI
VOLUME II · ANNUAL OF THE UPPER FLOOR MAIL-ORDER ED. · MMLXXIV / MMXXVI
§ 0 — MAST

A A welcome from the editors. This volume is the second of an irregular annual concerned exclusively with everything that lives one storey above its base. Mezzanines and matinees, attic libraries and aerial walkways, the 2F of a Tokyo bookshop, the reading balcony of a 19th-century library, the upper deck of a tram, the loft of an old letterpress shop — these are our beat. We are not, in any sense, a journal of distributed-ledger scaling. We are a wiki about second floors, written from the second floor.

We collect curiosities the way a cousin with too many shelves collects them: gently, generously, and with a slight smile. The articles you will read here arrive as puffy editorial dispatches from the floor above the ground floor. Each is annotated, cross-referenced, and gently inflated until it casts a soft shadow on the walnut floorboards.

Begin where you like. Ascend the staircase glyph for a directory of the rooms upstairs. Or simply walk forward by scrolling: a librarian, just off-screen, will slide each new specimen onto the floor as you pass.

— The Editors of the Upper Floor desk no. 2 / window-seat / late afternoon
§ I — DEFINITIONS
§ I DEFINITIONS

On the Word "Upstairs," and What We Mean by It

Upstairs is a soft word for a hard idea: the world is stacked. Wherever a human being has placed something on top of something else and then climbed up to read in it, eat in it, sell from it, or sleep in it, an upper floor has been called into being. This wiki names the upper floor's many regional dialects: the mezzanine, the loft, the gallery, the rood-loft, the catwalk, the second-storey verandah, the upper deck, the bel étage, the piano nobile, and the humble 2F.

We use the term "Layer 2" with deliberate looseness. To us, Layer 2 means anything constructed upon a Layer 1 — anything that gets the benefit of an existing surface, and in return is asked only to be lighter, friendlier, and one storey less burdened.

  • The mezzanine of an Antwerp coffee-house in 1907.
  • The reading balcony at the Bibliothèque Mazarine.
  • The upper deck of a Sheffield Roe-built tram, 1953.
  • The 2F of any second-hand bookshop in Jimbōchō.
  • The loft above the Hatch & Sons letterpress, Mile End.

See also fire escapes, philosophy of; the matinee; balcony, etymology of.

scotch · paste · 1968
FIG. A 2F sign painted in fade-orange paint above a Jimbōchō second-hand bookshop, photographed from across the street in monsoon light. The arrow points up, generously.
§ II — HISTORIES
§ II HISTORIES

A Brief History of Walking Upstairs

The earliest known second floors are not, as one might assume, military or ecclesiastical. They are domestic. In Çatalhöyük, ca. 7000 BCE, the dead were buried beneath the floor and the living climbed onto the roof to enter through a hatch — meaning, in the strictest sense, that everyone in the village lived on the second floor. We do not know what they called the first floor. Nothing, perhaps. It was the cellar of being.

The Roman pergula was a balcony slung over the street; the medieval solar was a private upstairs room, sun-soaked, where the lord did his accounting and his wife did her embroidery. By the eighteenth century the European bourgeoisie had invented the bel étage, the "beautiful floor," always the second one — high enough to escape the smell of the street, low enough to escape the cost of the climb. The piano nobile, in Venice, in Vicenza, in the inner ring of any Italian city: a place to be, a place to be seen, a place from which to lean out and accept a basket lowered from above.

Trams, Buses, and the Vertical Commute

The upper deck of a horse-drawn omnibus was, when it appeared in 1850s London, an emancipation. It was where one went to read, to flirt, to escape the conversation of one's aunt. The "knifeboard seating" of the original double-decker meant passengers sat back-to-back along the spine of the bus, watching the city pass on either side. The view was good. The wind was bracing. The price was tuppence.

We hold that the entire history of public transport is, secretly, a history of upper floors that move. The Wuppertal Schwebebahn, opened 1901, is a Layer 2 in the most literal sense: a railway hung above a river, a second floor with no first floor under it.

See also Wuppertal, suspended; knifeboard, seating arrangement of; solar room, accounting in.

FIG. β — TRAM
archive · loose · undated
FIG. β. A Sheffield Roe-built tramcar, 1953, photographed from a sun-cured upper-deck window. The deck-line is the floor on which the city's afternoon balanced.
— A SPREAD OF —

A Spread of Specimens

PLATE I. A reading balcony, undated. The librarian called it the "thinking shelf." We have not corrected her.
PLATE II. The loft above Hatch & Sons, Mile End, ca. 1962. The setter wears a thinking cap. He is composing an obituary for a typeface.
PLATE III. An attic library above a baker's, somewhere in Vienna. The card pocket reads: "Due back on the 2F." It always was.
§ III — SPECIMENS
§ III SPECIMENS

The Upper Floor As Concept — A Section Drawing

Figure §III·1. A schematic section through the conceptual building of the wiki. The Upper Floor is, by definition, anything that sits one storey above its base — and is generously inhabited by the four specimens labelled a–d above. See also elevator, awkward silence in.

specimen · pin · 1971
FIG. γ. A pavilion of the upper sort, photographed at a country fair, 1971. The visitor on the steps is, technically, becoming Layer 2 as we watch.
§ IV — LETTERS
§ IV LETTERS FROM READERS

Below: a representative selection of correspondence received at the Upper Floor's post-box, transcribed faithfully by our typewriter and gently rotated to suggest the loose stack of vellum on which they arrived.

FROM: Mrs. K. Halloran, Cork — postmarked 14·iii —

Dear Editors, — I read with great pleasure your note on the Bibliothèque Mazarine reading-balcony. You omit to say that the balcony in question creaks, audibly, at the hour of three in the afternoon. I have been the only soul on it on three separate occasions and I assure you it is not the wood. It is the building thinking. — Yours very sincerely.

FROM: Tomás G., Lisbon — postmarked 02·v —

Sirs, — A correction. The Sheffield trams of 1953 had four-wheel bogies, not six, on the Roe-bodied upper-deck cars. My grandfather drove number 312 on the Vulcan Road run and would never permit such an error in print. I trust the next mail-order edition will reflect this. He is watching from the upper deck, somewhere.

FROM: Anonymous, Tōkyō (Jimbōchō) — no postmark, slid under the door —

The 2F of the bookshop on the corner of Yasukuni-dōri and Hakusan-dōri is, I must report, no longer accessible by the original wooden staircase. They have installed a new, less courageous staircase next to it. The old one is roped off. Photographs may still be taken from the landing.

FROM: Dr. P. Wexler, retired — postmarked 19·viii —

I notice in your wiki no entry on the upper bunk. This is, surely, the most universal Layer 2 in the human experience. Almost everyone has slept on one. Almost no one has photographed one. I attach a sketch (enclosed). Please consider it for inclusion in your annual.

§ V — ERRATA
§ V ERRATA & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Errata to the previous volume

  • Vol. I §II — for "rood-loft" read "rood-loft." We had hyphenated it.
  • Vol. I §III — the photograph captioned "Antwerp, 1908" is in fact Ghent, 1909.
  • Vol. I colophon — the printer's mark was upside-down. We have inverted it again.
  • Vol. I, throughout — we apologise for the persistent fragrance of the warm-press ink. It is intentional.

Acknowledgements

With thanks to the librarians of the Bibliothèque Mazarine; to the unnamed elderly gentleman who permitted us to photograph the 2F of his Jimbōchō bookshop; to the descendants of Hatch & Sons; to every conductor who ever shouted upstairs! as the bus pulled away.

The inflated-3d illustrations in this volume were prepared in our editorial loft using stacked SVG paths and a very gentle pneumatic mind. No tree was harmed. One typewriter was lightly bruised.