Library of Babel: Every Book That Could Ever Be Written

The Library of Babel is a website containing every possible page of text. Not a lot of pages, every page. Every sentence you’ve ever spoken, every sentence you ever will speak, the exact words on your gravestone, the plot of every unwritten novel, all of it, already sitting at a fixed address, surrounded by an ocean of gibberish. It’s free, it works, and it will do something strange to your afternoon.

What is the Library of Babel?

In 1941 Jorge Luis Borges described an infinite library of hexagonal rooms holding every book that could be made from a small alphabet. Most volumes are noise. Somewhere in there is the perfect catalogue of the library, the true history of the future, and your own biography, but finding any of it is hopeless, and the librarians go mad.

This site built it. Not as a metaphor. As a functioning website with hexagons, walls, shelves, volumes and pages, each holding a specific block of characters. You can walk into a room, pull a book off a shelf, and read a page that nobody has ever read and nobody ever will again.

The clever part is that nothing is stored. Storing every possible page would require vastly more space than the observable universe provides. Instead, each page’s address and each page’s content are two forms of the same number, converted back and forth on demand. Visit the same address tomorrow and you get the same page. It was always there. It will always be there. That’s not a trick, that’s just what the mathematics says.

Which is why the search feature is the one that breaks people.

What can you do on the Library of Babel?

• Search for any text. Type a sentence: your name, a line from a song, something you thought of five seconds ago, and the site tells you exactly which hexagon, wall, shelf, volume and page it lives on. It doesn’t create the page. It locates it. That distinction is where the vertigo comes from.
• Browse the shelves. Pick a hexagon and start pulling books at random. Almost everything is unreadable strings of letters, which is exactly the experience Borges described. This is a feature.
• Read the anglicized view. There’s a mode that surfaces recognizable English words out of the noise, which produces accidental poetry and occasional lines that feel far too pointed.
• Bookmark pages. You can save pages you want to come back to, which is a genuinely funny thing to be able to do with an infinite library.
• Explore the image archive. There’s a companion project applying the same principle to pictures instead of text: every possible image at a small size, including every photograph ever taken and every one that never will be.
• Get a permanent address for a sentence. Any string you look up has a fixed, citable location. People have used this to “publish” things in the most technically true and practically useless way possible.

Go and get lost at libraryofbabel.info.

Tips to get the most out of it

1. Search for something personal first. Your full name. Your address. A private sentence. Finding it, knowing it was already there before you typed it, lands far harder than reading about the concept. Do this before you do anything else.
2. Then read what surrounds it. The real experience isn’t the hit; it’s seeing your sentence marooned in a page of pure noise, and understanding that its neighbors are equally “real.”
3. Browse randomly for a full minute. Pull ten books. Read nothing but static. This is the part most visitors skip, and it’s the part that makes the search result mean something.
4. Try the anglicized mode on a random page. Filtering the noise for real words produces sentences that sound like broken prophecy. It’s the closest the library gets to being readable, and it’s much stranger than plain gibberish.
5. Think about the search backwards. The site can find any text you type. So it can find the text you’re about to type. It already contains every question you’ll ever ask it, and every answer, including the wrong ones. Sit with that for a second, then close the tab.

If you like the Library of Babel, also try…

• This Person Does Not Exist: infinite faces of people who never lived. The visual sibling of the same unsettling idea.
• Project Gutenberg: the opposite approach: tens of thousands of books that are definitely real, definitely written by people, and free to read.
• Zoomquilt: an infinite painting that falls endlessly into itself.
• SCP Foundation: another vast, collaboratively built fiction dressed up as a functioning archive.
• Fall further down the rabbit hole in Weird & Wonderful.