The Library contains every possible book: 410 pages, 40 lines per page, 80 characters per line, drawn from an alphabet of 25 symbols (22 letters, space, comma, period). Somewhere in the Library exists: the cure for every disease; the date of your death; the complete works of Shakespeare in every language; the complete works of Shakespeare with one letter wrong on every page; this exact page; a page describing this exact page. All of them exist — all of them surrounded by billions upon billions of pages of incomprehensible nonsense.

Enter an address below — any phrase, any word, any thought. The Library will show you the page that lives at that address.

On the Nature of the Library

The Library is not a metaphor for the internet, or for possibility, or for the mind. It is a mathematical object. Its total volume is 25^(410 × 40 × 80) distinct books. Written out, this number has more digits than there are atoms in the observable universe. Almost every page is noise. The signal is in there somewhere.

The horror of the Library is not that it is empty. It is that it is full — full of everything, which is the same as full of nothing. A library where every possible book exists is a library where no book means anything, because meaning requires scarcity.

And yet Borges found it beautiful. He always did.