Jorge Luis Borges was a man who lived in a world of books, so it makes sense that he eventually decided the entire universe was one, too. In his 1941 short story, "The Library of Babel," he doesn't just describe a big building with a lot of dusty shelves. He describes a cosmic trap. It’s a place where every possible combination of 25 characters—letters, spaces, and commas—exists in a 410-page format.
Think about that for a second.
Every book that has ever been written is there. Every book that will be written is there. But here's the kicker: so is every possible lie, every gibberish string of "dhgs lksj," and every version of your own biography where you die in a different, slightly more embarrassing way. Honestly, it’s less of a dream for book lovers and more of a mathematical hellscape.
The Math Behind the Library of Babel
People often throw around the word "infinite" when talking about Borges, but the library isn't actually infinite. It’s just so unimaginably large that the distinction doesn't really matter to a human brain.
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Mathematically, the Library of Babel is a closed system. Borges specified the parameters: each book has 410 pages, each page has 40 lines, and each line has 80 characters. That gives us 1,312,000 characters per book. Using a 25-character alphabet, the total number of books is $25^{1,312,000}$.
To put that in perspective, there are roughly $10^{80}$ atoms in the observable universe. The number of books in the library is a number so vast that if you turned every single atom in the universe into its own universe, and then turned every atom in those universes into a library, you still wouldn't be close.
It’s basically a rounding error away from eternity.
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Why the librarians are actually miserable
You’d think living in a library with all the world's secrets would be cool. It’s not. Most librarians in the story spend their lives wandering through hexagonal rooms, flipping through volumes that contain nothing but "j,j,j,j" for four hundred pages.
The "Search for the Vindications" is one of the most tragic parts of the lore. Since the library contains every book, it must contain a book that justifies every single human action and predicts every person’s future. People went insane trying to find theirs. They started cults. They became "Purifiers" who threw non-sensical books down the ventilation shafts (which did nothing, because the library is too big to be cleaned).
The "Real" Library of Babel is Online
Kinda wild, but you can actually visit it. A programmer named Jonathan Basile created a digital version of the Library of Babel. It’s not just a random text generator; it’s a searchable database that uses an algorithm to map every possible page of text to a specific "location" in a virtual library.
If you type a secret into the search bar, the site will show you exactly where that secret "lives" in the library. It was always there. It will always be there.
Does it actually contain "everything"?
Yes and no. Technically, a single book in Borges's world is limited to those 1.3 million characters. So, while it contains Moby Dick, it might not contain Moby Dick followed immediately by the entire Harry Potter series in a single volume. You'd have to find the next volume that starts exactly where the first one left off.
It’s a fragmented reality.
What Borges was actually trying to say
Borges wasn't just geeky about math. He was obsessed with the idea that human language is a failing tool. We try to use these 25 symbols to explain a universe that is fundamentally indifferent to us.
In the story, the "Man of the Book" is a myth about a librarian who found the "Catalog of Catalogs"—a book that explains everything else. It’s the ultimate pursuit of truth. But Borges suggests that even if you found it, you wouldn't know it was the real one. Because for every true catalog, there are trillions of slightly altered, false catalogs.
Total information is the same thing as total silence.
How to actually use the Library of Babel concept
If you're a writer or a programmer, this isn't just a cool story. It's a lesson in "noise." We’re living in a digital Library of Babel right now. With AI generating millions of words a second, the "true" information is getting drowned out by the "statistical" information.
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Here is how you can engage with the concept today:
- Visit libraryofbabel.info: Search for your own name or a sentence you’ve never told anyone. Seeing it exist in a "book" written decades before you were born is a trip.
- Use it for writer's block: Use the "random" feature. Sometimes the juxtaposition of three real words in a sea of nonsense can spark an idea you’d never have on your own.
- Read the original text: It's only about 7-10 pages long. You can find it in his collection Ficciones.
The biggest takeaway from the Library of Babel is a bit of a reality check: meaning isn't something you find in a pile of data. It's something you have to create yourself. Without a human reader to give the letters weight, the library is just a lot of paper and ink. Or, in our case, a lot of ones and zeros.