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2014
Mixed Media
12 x 12 x15
The Library of Babel is modeled after the library described in a story of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges which was published in Spanish in 1941. Borges’ narrator describes the Library as a series of hexagonal rooms, each of which has four walls of bookshelves. While the order and content of the books appear to be random, the Librarians believe that the Library contains every possible combination of just 25 basic characters (22 letters, the period, the comma, and space). The Librarians assume that among the unreadable volumes, they can find every coherent book ever written, or that might ever be written along with every possible version of every one of those books.