Publishing Company Blog | Virtual Library of Babel makes Borges's infinite store of books a reality

Virtual Library of Babel makes Borges's infinite store of books a reality – almost

Written By Unknown on Monday, May 4, 2015 | 7:06 AM

Jorge Luis Borges’s 1941 tale about a library containing every possible combination of letters – every work that could ever be written – has come to life online. And its creator is no closer to finding anything new that makes sense

Jorge Luis Borges’s fictional librarian claimed to have discovered books entitled “The Combed Thunderclap”, “The Plaster Cramp” and “Axaxaxas mlő” within the endless walls of the Library of Babel. So far, writer Jonathan Basile’s trawling of his digital version of the library has only yielded the title Dog.

Borges’s seminal 1941 story imagined an almost infinite library containing every possible combination of letters in a vast collection of 410-page books. “The universe (which others call the Library),” it begins, “is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries … The Library is total and ... its shelves contain all the possible combinations of the 20-odd orthographic symbols ... that is, everything which can be expressed, in all languages.”