The Library of Babel

Imagining an Infinite Library Decades Before the Internet

Mar 31, 2008 Robert O'Connor

An essay by James Grimmelmann remarks on the similarities between the Internet and The Library of Babel, but there are many things to be done to make that comparison apt.

James Grimmelmann, now a professor at New York Law School published an essay called "Information Policy for the Library of Babel" which compares the Internet and the library described in Jorge Luis Borges story "The Library of Babel" (first published in The Garden of Forking Paths, 1941).

The Library of Babel

In the story, Borges describes an infinite library where books contain every possible combination of letters, spaces and punctuation marks. Although many of the books are gibberish, Borges says that many of them contain every written work and every work to be written.

Borges presents the problem of an abundance of knowledge by having the librarians in a state of despair. He also imagines the existance of a "Crimson Hexagon" (the rooms in the library are hexagonal shaped), which has a book that is a log of all other books. Borges likens the person reading it to God. Grimmelmann closes his essay by saying that the log is named "Google."

Lack of Translations

Of course, one of the short-comings of this comparison is that the books are supposed to contain every written work and every work to be written as well as translations of these works into every concievable language.

The internet does indeed have translations of many works available on it, but unfortunately the efforts to offer translate lesser known works are few and far between.

The problem with translation has been to only translate works which are classics of the language. Take Italian, for example. The works of Dante, Boccacio, Petrarch and a large number of earlier Latin poets have been translated into many languages. However, Emilio Salgari, whose work is still widely read in Italy, Portugal and Spanish-speaking countries, his work is unknown in the English-speaking world.

In the spirit of the Library of Babel, SOMEbody should take up the endeavour of translating Emilio Salgari into English. (Louis Henri Boussenard and Karl May are other authors whose work has rarely been translated into english. Also, Jules Verne's work has been poorly translated, so one project for someone is to do a good translation of Verne's work).

Quantity of Information

But that's not the point of the story of "The Library of Babel." The reason why the books contain every work that will be written is because each book has a unique combination of letters, words and spaces. The books are a collection of every possible combination of those three elements. Therefore, most of the books will contain gibberish, but a minority of the books will be a work by someone.

A similar comparrison, made by Grimmelman in his essay, can be made to the Internet, with its billions of pages. Both present the same problem of a large gathering of information. The larger the gathering, the more useless the information.

David Langford wrote a story called "The Net of Babel" published in a 1995 issue of Interzone satirizing the problem.

The copyright of the article The Library of Babel in World Literatures is owned by Robert O'Connor. Permission to republish The Library of Babel in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Library of Babel