The Library of Babel is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges.

It describes a library made up of an “indefinite, perhaps infinite” number hexagonal of rooms, each lined on four sides by a bookshelf of five shelves, each self containing thirty-two books. Each book is four hundred and ten pages of forty lines, each line of eighty characters.

The character set in these books is limited to the twenty-six lower-case letters of the English alphabet, the comma, the full-stop, and the space. In the story, Borges actually says twenty-two letters, ignoring some he deemed unnecessary. The full alphabet is used on this site.

In its pages, the library contains every possible combination of these characters. No two books are the same — meaning that the library is “total — perfect, complete, and whole”. Everything that ever has been, or ever will be written using these twenty-nine characters is contained somewhere within the library.

This is a re-creation of the library, explorable from your web browser. It is the only complete re-creation of the Library of Babel, in that it contains every single unique book — not just every unique page.

You can get started by browsing the library from the beginning, from a random page, or by searching for some text.

Try searching for your name, your date of birth, or maybe a line from your favourite song or poem. Search for a paragraph from a book, perhaps a book that is yet to be written.

Please see the about page and the GitHub repository for a more technical explanation of how this site works and to view the source code. For any feedback, please get in touch via the GitHub repo or at babel@tdjs.tech.