The Library of Babel

"The Library of 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 and character set. The story was originally published in Spanish in Borges' 1941 collection of stories (The Garden of Forking Paths).

The story repeats the theme of Borges' 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". 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, Ramón Llull's thinking machine. The elements of his game are the universal orthographic symbols, not the words of a language.

Borges’ librarian-narrator tells of only 22 letters among the endless hexagons of books. Despite their similarities, one thing is absent completely from Lasswitz’ story: a 22-letter alphabet. The Professor does not imagine reducing the character set below 100 figures, including far more punctuation than Borges will allow, upper- and lower-case letters, and even some figures for scientific notation. It seems Lasswitz’ professor is more concerned with tidy sums than efficiency: he proposes permuting the 100 characters over 500 pages of 40 lines each, with 50 characters per line. This gives exactly one million characters per book and 10^2.000.000 (this is '1' followed by 2 million zeros) possible books. Whether or not this is more elegant than Borges’ 25^1312000 is a matter of taste. To really grasp these figures, consider that in the observable universe it is estimated that there are between 10⁷⁸ to 10⁸² atoms.

Many of Borges' signature motifs are featured in the story, including infinity, reality, cabalistic reasoning, and labyrinths. Here's an extract of the Borges story:

"When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope. At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proferred dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. Others went mad ... The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons of the future, to persons who are perhaps not imaginary) but the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man's finding his Vindication, or some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as zero."

The concept of the library is often compared to Borel's dactylographic monkey theorem. There is no reference to monkeys or typewriters in "The Library of Babel", although Borges had mentioned that analogy in "The Total Library": "[A] 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."

Jonathan Basile simulates an English-language version of Borges' library on the art website libraryofbabel.info An algorithm he created generates a 'book' by iterating every permutation of 29 characters: the 26 English letters, space, comma, and period. Each book is marked by a coordinate, corresponding to its place on the hexagonal library (hexagon name, wall number, shelf number, and book name) so that every book can be found at the same place every time. The website is said to contain "all possible pages of 3200 characters, about 10⁴⁶⁷⁷ books".

– Search-result generated page containing the extracted paragraph from the Borges story
https://libraryofbabel.info/

– Random generated page from https://libraryofbabel.info/

The concept of the library is also overtly analogous to the view of the universe as a sphere having its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere. The mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal employed this metaphor, and in an earlier essay Borges noted that Pascal's manuscript called the sphere effroyable, or "frightful". In any case, a library containing all possible books, arranged at random, might as well be a library containing zero books, as any true information would be buried in, and rendered indistinguishable from, all possible forms of false information; the experience of opening to any page of any of the library's books has been simulated by websites which create screenfuls of random letters.

—Original story of "The Universal Library" by Kurd Lasswitz.
—Original story of "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges.
https://libraryofbabel.info/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel