Jorge Luis Borges Library of Babel Realized Online

By Dianna Dilworth 

In a short story published in 1941, author Jorge Luis Borges had imagined a series of rooms full of books that contained every character and word of every book ever written or could be written. The library featured every possible story that could ever be written, but this glut of information led readers and librarians to despair.

Brooklyn-based author Jonathan Basile has taken Borges’ vision of the Library of Babel and built it online. Check it out:

The Library of Babel is a place for scholars to do research, for artists and writers to seek inspiration, for anyone with curiosity or a sense of humor to reflect on the weirdness of existence – in short, it’s just like any other library. If completed, it would contain every possible combination of 1,312,000 characters, including lower case letters, space, comma, and period. Thus, it would contain every book that ever has been written, and every book that ever could be – including every play, every song, every scientific paper, every legal decision, every constitution, every piece of scripture, and so on. At present it contains 1,024,640 volumes.