Library of Babel

How it works

The library is not stored anywhere; indeed, thinking it is would be a rather foolish notion. A page from it is 40 lines of 80 symbols from an alphabet of 29 (letters + space + comma + full stop), and that in turn is a 3200-digit number in base 29, one integer in the range from zero to 29 to the power 3200. The address of our page is just that: an integer pushed through an invertible affine map and split into page, volume, shelf, wall and a hexagon name in base 36. Every integer in the range is a page, and so every page exists and has exactly one address. I find this version of the Library rather closely aligned with Borges’s vision of it as one book with infinitely many infinitely thin pages; certainly more portable than an infinite tower.

“find” takes your phrase, drops it into a random page and computes the address of the result, which costs a few big-integer operations rather than a search, a foolhardy undertaking anyway, to search (an) infinity.

The idea is, naturally, not my own, and indeed was not plucked from the Library but from libraryofbabel.info. I just found it irresistible to have everything contained in language on something I can call mine; that is, I suppose, the allure of Babel, and the hubris of men.