Library of Babel

Library of Babel

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I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

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Erik Desmazires, Illustrations for Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel

2000

"The Library of Babel" (Spanish: La biblioteca de Babel) is a short story by Argentine author and librarian Jorge Luis Borges (1899/1986), conceiving of a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books of a certain format.



2000

Borges's narrator describes how his universe consists of an enormous expanse of interlocking hexagonal rooms, each of which contains the bare necessities for human survivaland four walls of bookshelves. Though the order and content of the books is random and apparently completely meaningless, the inhabitants believe that the books contain every possible ordering of just a few basic characters (letters, spaces and punctuation marks).



2000

Though the majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent book ever written, or that might ever be written, and every possible permutation or slightly erroneous version of every one of those books.



2000

The narrator notes that the library must contain all useful information, including predictions of the future, biographies of any person, and translations of every book in all languages. Conversely, for many of the texts some language could be devised that would make it readable with any of a vast number of different contents.


The Long Room at Trinity College LIbrary

Dublin, 1712/1732

Despite indeed, because of this glut of information, all books are totally useless to the reader, leaving the librarians in a state of suicidal despair. This leads some librarians to superstitions and cult-like behaviour, such as the "Purifiers", who arbitrarily destroy books they deem nonsense as they move through the library seeking the "Crimson Hexagon" and its illustrated, magical books.


Unkown Author, Unknown Image

-from National Geographic-

Another is the belief that since all books exist in the library, somewhere one of the books must be a perfect catalog of the library's contents; some even believe that a messianic figure known as the "Man of the Book" has read it, and they travel through the library seeking him.


Riggs Library

Georgetown University, XIX century

The story repeats the theme of Borges's 1939 essay "The Total Library" ("La biblioteca total"), which in turn acknowledges the earlier development of this theme by Kurd Lasswitz in his 1901 story "The Universal Library" ("Die Universalbibliotek"):

Certain examples that Aristotle attributes to Democritus and Leucippus clearly prefigure it, but its belated inventor is Gustav Theodor Fechner, and its first exponent, Kurd Lasswitz. [...] In his book The Race with the Tortoise (Berlin, 1919), Dr Theodor Wolff suggests that it is a derivation from, or a parody of, Ramn Llull's thinking machine [...] The elements of his game are the universal orthographic symbols, not the words of a language [...] Lasswitz arrives at twenty-five symbols (twenty-two letters, the space, the period, the comma), whose recombinations and repetitions encompass everything possible to express in all languages. The totality of such variations would form a Total Library of astronomical size. Lasswitz urges mankind to construct that inhuman library, which chance would organize and which would eliminate intelligence. (Wolff's The Race with the Tortoise expounds the execution and the dimensions of that impossible enterprise.)


tienne-Louis Boulle, Project for a Royal Library

1785

Many of Borges's signature themes are featured in the story, including infinity, reality, cabalistic reasoning, and labyrinths. The concept of the library is often compared to Borel's dactylographic monkey theorem. There is no reference to monkeys or typewriters in the The Library of Babel story; Borges had mentioned that analogy in his earlier 1939 essay The Total Library: "half-dozen monkeys provided with typewriters would, in a few eternities, produce all the books in the British Museum". In this story, the closest equivalent is the line: "A blasphemous sect suggested [...] that all men should juggle letters and symbols until they constructed, by an improbable gift of chance, these canonical books".


Sydney Smirke, Old British Reading Room

British Museum, London, 1857

The British Museum Reading Room, situated in the centre of the Great Court of the British Museum, used to be the main reading room of the British Library. In 1997, this function moved to the new British Library building at St Pancras, London, but the Reading Room remains in its original form inside the new British Museum. Designed by Sydney Smirke on a suggestion by the Library's Chief Librarian Anthony Panizzi, following an earlier competition idea by William Hosking, the Reading Room was in continual use from 1857 until its temporary closure in 1997.


Alberto Kalach, Juan Palomar, Gustavo Lipkau, Tonatiuh Martnez (Taller de Arquitectura X), Public Library

Mexico City, 2004/2007


Kazuya Morita Architecture Studio, Shelf-Pod

Osaka Prefecture, 2006/2007

Library of Babel

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Transcript of Library of Babel