Library of Babel

Search the Library

Every text that could be written exists somewhere in the stacks. Enter a phrase; the library will locate its address.

The search does not scan the pages. It places your text. By the first axiom, every possible sequence of characters occupies some coordinate in the library; the algorithm computes which one and navigates you there.

The page you arrive at will be procedurally generated from that coordinate, not transcribed from your phrase. This is the correct behaviour. The library contains your sentence; it does not display it on demand.

The Six Axioms

I The Library has existed from eternity and shall endure forever.

II There are twenty-five orthographic symbols: twenty-two letters, the period, the comma, and the space.

III Each book is four hundred and ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, eighty characters.

IV No two books in the Library are identical.

V The Library is total: all possible orderings of the symbols fill all possible volumes.

VI The Library is finite but without limit; it is periodic, and its galleries repeat.

From La biblioteca de Babel (1941) by Jorge Luis Borges. This toy is a small, willfully imperfect echo of that story. For the canonical digital implementation, see Jonathan Basile’s libraryofbabel.info — a genuine feat of engineering that realises Borges’ mathematics exactly.

This version uses a smaller address space (1 000 wings × 40 shelves × 100 volumes × 512 pages = ~2 048 000 000 pages) and procedurally generated prose. The coordinates are permanent: the same address always yields the same page.

Galleries

Search the Library

corkboard

How to wander