Others believe that since all books exist in the library, somewhere one of the books must be a perfect index 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. This leads some librarians to superstitious and cult-like behaviors, such as the "Purifiers", who arbitrarily destroy books they deem nonsense as they scour through the library seeking the "Crimson Hexagon" and its illustrated, magical books. 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.ĭespite-indeed, because of-this glut of information, all books are totally useless to the reader, leaving the librarians in a state of suicidal despair.
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. Though the vast 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. Though the order and content of the books are random and apparently completely meaningless, the inhabitants believe that the books contain every possible ordering of just 25 basic characters (22 letters, the period, the comma, and space). In each room, there is an entrance on one wall, the bare necessities for human survival on another wall, and four walls of bookshelves. Irby in a diverse collection of Borges's works titled Labyrinths and the other by Anthony Kerrigan as part of a collaborative translation of the entirety of Ficciones.īorges' narrator describes how his universe consists of an enormous expanse of adjacent hexagonal rooms. Two English-language translations appeared approximately simultaneously in 1962, one by James E.
That entire book was, in turn, included within his much-reprinted Ficciones ( 1944).
The story was originally published in Spanish in Borges' 1941 collection of stories El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan ( The Garden of Forking Paths). " 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 and character set.
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