"The Library of 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.
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). That entire book was, in turn, included within his much-reprinted Ficciones (1944). Two English-language translations appeared approximately simultaneously in 1962, one by James E. 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.
Plot
Borges' narrator describes how his universe consists of an enormous expanse of adjacent hexagonal rooms. In each room, there is an opening in the floor to the hexagons above and below, four walls of bookshelves, and two junctions between hexagons each containing a latrine, a sleeping closet, and a stairwell. 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). Though the vast majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the laws of probability dictate that 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. 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. 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.
Despite these theories, all books are functionally totally useless to the reader, as any correct, legible text that can exist occurs due to pure chance and must exist alongside countless completely incorrect writings. This leads to many superstitions, cults, and heresies within the wider organized religion of the library; the "Purifiers" arbitrarily destroy books they deem nonsense as they scour through the library seeking the "Crimson Hexagon" and its illustrated, magical books. 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. The narrator notes the population of the library has been gravely decimated by centuries of religious conflict and disease, but maintains his faith in the beauty and organization of the library as undeniable proof of a God or other demiurge, reaffirming his own attempts to find some ultimate meaning to the library and humanity's existence within it.
Themes
thumb|right|Borges in 1967
The story repeats the theme of Borges' 1939 essay "The Total Library" (), which in turn acknowledges the earlier development of this theme by Kurd Lasswitz in his 1901 story "The Universal Library" ():