La Biblioteca es una esfera cuyo centro cabal es cualquier hexagono,

cuya circunferencia es inaccesible

TH Eu n v E R Se

is

posedcomofHEXAGONAL

GALLLERIES.MIRRORin THE VestibulE there is a

Lik

e a

ll t

he m

en o

f t

he L

ibrary, in

my

younger d

ays I

tr

av

el

ed

. I h

ave j

ou

rn

ey

ed

in q

uest o

f a

book, p

erhaps t

he c

atalog

of c

atalogs

.

Now t

hat m

y e

yes c

an

hardly

make o

ut

what

I myself have

writ

ten, I

am p

reparin

g t

o d

ie, a

few l

eagues f

rom t

he

where I

was b

orn. W

hen I

am d

ead,

compassio

nate h

ands w

ill t

hrow m

e o

ver t

he r

ail

ing. m

y t

omb w

ill b

e t

he u

nfathomable a

ir, m

y b

ody w

ill s

ink

for a

ges, a

nd w

ill d

ecay a

nd d

issolve in

the w

ind

engendered b

y m

y f

all, w

hic

h s

hall b

e i

nf

in

it

e. I

declare t

hat t

he L

ibrary is

endless.......... I

dealis

ts a

rgue t

hat t

he h

exagonal r

ooms

are t

he

necessary s

hape o

f a

bsolute s

pace, o

r a

t l

east o

f o

ur p

erceptio

n o

f s

pace. T

hey a

rgue t

hat a

or c

hamber is

inconceiv

able. (M

ystic

s c

laim

that t

heir

ecstasie

s r

eveal t

o t

hem a

chamber c

ontain

ing a

n e

normous c

ircular b

ook w

ith a

contin

uous s

pin

e t

hat g

oes c

ompletely a

round t

he w

alls. B

ut t

heir

testim

ony is

suspect, t

heir

words o

bscure. T

hat c

yclic

al b

ook is

God.) L

et it

suffic

e f

or t

he m

oment t

hat I

repeat t

he c

lassic

dic

tum:

The li brary is a sphere whose exact centre is Any hexagon and whose cir-cumference is unattainable.

Second: The orthographical symbols are twenty-five in number. (1) This finding made it possible, three hundred years ago, to formulate a general theory of the Library and solve satisfactorily the problem which no conjec-ture had deciphered: the formless and chaotic nature of almost all the books. One which my father saw in a hexagon on circuit fifteen ninety-four was made up of the letters MCV, perversely repeated from the first line to the last. Another (very much consulted in this area) is a mere labyrinth of letters, but the next-to-last page says Oh time thy pyramids. This much is already known: for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences. (I know of an uncouth region whose librarians repudiate the vain and supersti-tious custom of finding a meaning in books and equate it with that of finding a meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of ones palm ... They admit that the inventors of this writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but maintain that this application is accidental and that the books signify nothing in themselves. This dictum, we shall see, is not entirely falla-cious.) For a long time it was believed that these impenetrable books correspond-ed to past or remote languages. It is true that the most ancient men, the first librarians, used a language quite different from the one we now speak; it is true that a few miles to the right the tongue is dialectical and that ninety floors farther up, it is incomprehensible. All this, I repeat, is true, but four hundred and ten pages of inalterable MCVs cannot correspond to any language, no matter how dialectical or rudimentary it may be. Some insinuated that each letter could influence the following one and that the value of MCV in the third line of page 71 was not the one the same series may have in another position on another page, but this vague thesis did not pre-vail. Others thought of cryptographs; generally, this conjecture has been accepted, though not in the sense in which it was formulated by its origina-tors. Five hundred years ago, the chief of an upper hexagon (2) came upon a book as confusing as the others, but which had nearly two pages of homogeneous lines. He showed his find to a wandering decoder who told him the lines were written in Portuguese; others said they were Yiddish. Within a century, the language was established: a Samoyedic Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with classical Arabian inflections. The content was also deciphered: some notions of combinative analysis, illustrated with examples of variations with unlimited repetition. These examples made it possible for a librarian of genius to discover the fundamental law of the Library. This thinker ob-served that all the books, no matter how diverse they might be, are made up of the same elements: the space, the period, the comma, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also alleged a fact which travelers have confirmed: In the vast Library there are no two identical books. From these two incontro-vertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels autobiogra-phies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commen-tary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books. When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thou-sands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proferred dark curses, strangled

Each wall of

each hexagon is

furnished with five bookshelves; eachbookshelf holds

thirty-two books identical in format;

each book contains lbur hundred ten

pages; each page, forty lines; each

line, approximately

eighty black letters. There are also letters on the

front cover of each book; those letters

neither indicate nor prefigure what

the pages inside will say. I am aware

that that lack of correspondence

once struck men as mysterious.

the Libr- arY

IN ORDER TO GRASP THE DISTANCE THAT S E P A R A T E S THE HUMAN AND THE DIVINE, ONE HAS ONLY TO COMPARE THESE CRUDETREMBLING symbols which MY FALLIBLE HAND scrawls ON THE COVER OF A BOOK WITH THE ORGANIC LETTERS INSIDE NEAT, delicate, DEEP BLACK,

AND INIMITABLY SYMMETRICAL SYMMETRICAL

B A B E L.The Library has existed ab eternitate. That truth, whose immedi-ate coro llry is the future eternity of the world, no ra-tional mind can doubt

MAN, THE IMPER

FECT LIBRAR

IAN, MAY BE THE W

ORK OF CHANC

E OR OF

MALEVOLENT

DEMIURGES TH

E

UNIVERSE, WITH ITS ELEGANT A

PPOINTMENTS

ITS

BOOKSHELVE

S, ITS ENIGMA

TIC BOOKS, IT

S INDEFATIGAB

LE

S T

A

I

R

CASES

FOR THE

TRAVELLER, A

ND ITS WATER

CLOSETS FOR

THE SEATED L

IBRARIAN CAN

ONLY BE THE

HANDIWORK OF

A

GOD.

THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT HAS

NEITHER NUMB3RS NOR capital LETTERS;

PUNCTUATION IS LIMITED TO THE ,

AND THE . .THOSE TWO MARKS, THE ,

AND THE TWENTY TWO LETTERS OF

THE ARE THE TWENTY FIVE SUFFICIENT SYMBOLS THAT OUR UNKNOWN

AUTHOR IS REFERRING TO.

THERE ARE TWENTY FIVE RTH GRAPHIC SYMB LS.

abcdefghijklM nopqrstuvwxyz

V A L U ET H E O F

M C V O N P A G E 71 L I N E 3 I S N OT T H E S A M E O F T H E S A M E S

E R I E S O N A N

O T H E R L I N E

V A L U ET H E O F

M C V O N P A G E 71 L I N E 3 I S N OT T H E S A M E O F T H E S A M E S

E R I E S O N A N

O T H E R L I N E

V A L U ET H E O F

M C V O N P A G E 71 L I N E 3 I S N OT T H E S A M E O F T H E S A M E S

E R I E S O N A N

O T H E R L I N E

V A L U ET H E O F

M C V O N P A G E 71 L I N E 3 I S N OT T H E S A M E O F T H E S A M E S

E R I E S O N A N

O T H E R L I N E

The library is total, perfect, complete and whole.

i d e n T I c a lTHERe

IdeNTiCALtwo

are NOtwo

books

there ARE no there ARE no BOOKSTHERE ARE NO TWO / i d e n t i c a l b o o k s /

thERE are no TWO idENtical books

there are no tht h e r e a r e n o t w o i d e n t i c a l b o o k sidentical books

PROBLEMPROBLEM

was NO PERSONAL

NO WORLD

eth re

the universe was justified.

words.

S e a r c h -

i n g

f o r

d isgracefuld i s honourableor

DlSproportionateD E

p r e s sl O ND E

p r e s sl O N

P R E S S

these precious books were forever out of r e a c h

DlSproportionateD E

p r e s sl O ND E

p r e s sl O N

P R E S S

these precious books were forever out of r e a c h r e a c h

They would invade the tials that were not al ly through a volume, books. It is to their hy lay the senseless lo ss of millions of volumes.

gienic ascetic rage, that WE and condemn entire walls OF

ways false, leaf disgustED-

h e x a g o N S , show creDEN

B00SSEL .SKETANELIMIWORTH

We also have knowledge of

another superstition from that

period: belief in what was term

ed the Book-Man.

Many have gone in search

of Him. For a hundred years,

men beat every possible

path and every path in vain.

If the honor and wisdom and

joy of such a reading are not to be m

y own, then let them

be for others.

Let heaven exist though my

own place be in hell. Let me

be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enorm

ous library m

ay find its justification.

POSSIBLEPOSSIBLE

POIB LE

R EA D MEYouWho

CERTAIN

AreYou

U DE N RSTAND OU Y

MY

U ELANG AG ??

R EA D MEYouWho

CERTAIN

AreYou

U DE N RSTAND OU Y

MY

U ELANG AG ??

met

hodi

cal

com

posit

ion.

met

hodi

cal

com

posit

ion.

The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasnal. I know districts in which the young people prostrate themselves before books and like savages kiss their pages, though they cannot read a letter. Epidemics, heretical discords, pilgrimages that inevitably

degenerate into brigandage have decimated the population. I believe I mentioned the suicides, which are more and more frcquent every year. I am perhaps misled by old age and fear, but I suspect that the

human species the only species teeters at the verge of extinction, yet that the Library, enlightened, solitary, infinite, perfectly unmoving, armed with precious volumes, pointless, incorruptible, and secret,

will endure.

dis-tracts fro the pres-ent co di-tion hu anty

DISTRACTSMEFROMTHE PRESENTCONDITION OFHUMANITY

DIS-TRACTS ME FROM THE PRES-ENT CONDI-TION OF HUMANI-TY

met

hodi

cal

com

posit

ion.

The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasnal. I know districts in which the young people prostrate themselves before books and like savages kiss their pages, though they cannot read a letter. Epidemics, heretical discords, pilgrimages that inevitably

degenerate into brigandage have decimated the population. I believe I mentioned the suicides, which are more and more frcquent every year. I am perhaps misled by old age and fear, but I suspect that the

human species the only species teeters at the verge of extinction, yet that the Library, enlightened, solitary, infinite, perfectly unmoving, armed with precious volumes, pointless, incorruptible, and secret,

will endure.

dis-tracts fro the pres-ent co di-tion hu anty

DISTRACTSMEFROMTHE PRESENTCONDITION OFHUMANITY

DIS-TRACTS ME FROM THE PRES-ENT CONDI-TION OF HUMANI-TY

THE LI-BRARY IS

UNLIMIT-EDBUT PERIOD-

it is not illogical

to think the world is

infinite

and yet those who

picture the world as

unlimited forget that

the number of possible

books is not

the vast library is

pointless

IC.

THE LI-BRARY IS

UNLIMIT-EDBUT PERIOD-

it is not illogical

to think the world is

infinite

and yet those who

picture the world as

unlimited forget that

the number of possible

books is not

the vast library is

pointless

IC.

La Biblioteca es una esfera cuyo centro cabal es cualquier hexagono,

cuya circunferencia es inaccesible