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title: "On the Library of Babel"
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# The Library of Babel

In 1941, Jorge Luis Borges published what many consider his most perfect short story: "La biblioteca de Babel" [@borges1941library]. The premise is deceptively simple yet philosophically devastating: the universe consists of an enormous, perhaps infinite, library.

## Structure of the Library

The Library is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite, number of hexagonal galleries. Each hexagon contains exactly twenty bookshelves, five on each of four walls. Each shelf holds thirty-two books of identical format: each book has four hundred ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, approximately eighty black letters.

The totality of such letters comprises twenty-five orthographical symbols: the twenty-two letters of the alphabet, the comma, the period, and the space. No two books are identical. From these incontrovertible premises, the librarian deduces that the Library is total---that its shelves contain all possible combinations of the twenty-five symbols, which is to say, all that can be expressed in any language.

## The Total Library

The concept of a universal library predates Borges. The German author Kurd Lasswitz explored similar territory [@kurd1933hexagonal], calculating that such a library, while enormous, would be finite. Borges, characteristically, preferred the more vertiginous infinite.

Later collected in *Ficciones* [@borges1944ficciones], the story has influenced countless writers. Umberto Eco's medieval mystery [@eco1980name] features a labyrinthine library that kills to protect its secrets. Italo Calvino [@calvino1979winter] wrote an entire novel about the impossibility of reading a single book completely.
