The Library of Babel

home

experimental texts

2012

Lawrence S Johnson 

dgihsmunllb, a volume from the Library of Babel, generated by my PHP program and printed by the Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts

download volumes from The Library of Babel 

The Universe (which some call the Library) is made up of an uncounted, possibly infinite number of six-sided rooms. A vast well, in the center of each room and guarded by a low railing, admits air.

Jorge Luis Borges' story, The Library of Babel opens with the above words. A little later, Borges describes the bookshelves and the books:

On each wall there are five shelves, each holding thirty-two books with identical layouts and bindings. Each book has four hundred ten pages; each page has forty lines; each line is made up of more or less eighty letters, all black. 

He then states that the letters in each book appear to be completely random (as if typed by the chimpanzees we so often hear about) and that the inhabitants of the Library are constantly searching for readable text within the innumerable volumes. The story explores the many philosophical implications of this situation.

There have been several realizations of volumes of the Library that have used lines of exactly eighty letters. I believe that Borges described the books differently. He wrote ...cada renglón, de unas ochenta letras de color negro  which I translate literally to each line of some eighty black letters. So not exactly eighty, but more-or-less eighty. I think it's quite clear that Borges conceived of the books as set in a conventional, variably-spaced typeface, with variable letter-counts for each line, averaging eighty letters.

Loving Borges' work, and loving The Library of Babel above all, I started generating volumes from the Library in 2012, using a PHP program I wrote. These are unique in that they use variably-spaced fonts and are still fully justified (explanation below.) 

Here are a growing number of pdf files of Library of Babel volumes from my program which you are free to download and use as you wish (but don't copyright them. All these files are copyright @ 2020 Lawrence S. Johnson) :

download volumes from The Library of Babel 

I had three copies of dgihsmunllb printed in 2012 (see photo above) for the exhibition VERBI-VOCO-VISUAL: CONCRETE POETRY AND DERIVATIONS, 1972-2013, curated by the late Jed Speare at Mobius in Boston. I have one copy, my niece, Beth Myhr,  has another, and Jed's estate has the third. Rereading the Borges story, I note that he states: There are no two books alike in the vast Library. By printing three copies of the same book, I feel like I have violated a sacred statute. I wish I had understood this eight years ago. Perhaps the other two volumes no longer exist, and balance has been restored to the universe of the Library. 

 This is certainly not the first program to generate Babel volumes. Looking at earlier efforts, I noticed that they invariably used monospaced fonts (like Courier) and that all the lines were exactly eighty characters in length. I prefer fonts with variable widths, like the Helvetica I am writing in right now, and I really prefer the flowing rhythms of a page set in such a typeface.

monospaced (above)

vs.

variably-widthed 

Of course books look better when the letters on the right side of the page line up, or are justified. And, as I have observed above, Borges conceived of the books with this kind of font, and lines of  approximately eighty letters. Here's the upper right corner of  dgihsmunllb

This happens automatically when the font is monospaced and the lines are all the same width, but it became a frustrating programming problem when I tried to generate volumes with my PHP program. Eventually I got it work, but the program was very slow, and often it would time out after thirty seconds, and not produce anything. I went back to the program today, and it can now generate a volume in two or three seconds. Apparently my hosting company, FatCow, has replaced their servers with much faster machines. It makes me a little sad that I am abandoning my website and won't be able to easily make new volumes. (But why is it important to do this?)

download volumes from The Library of Babel