The Library of Babel

"The Library of Babel" is a short story by Argentine author and librarian Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), conceiving of a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books of a certain format. The story originally appeared in Spanish in Borges's 1941 collection of stories El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths). That entire book was, in turn, included within his much-reprinted Ficciones (1944). Two English-language translation appeared approximately simultaneously in 1962, one by James E. Irby in a diverse collection of Borges's works entitled Labyrinths and the other by Anthony Kerrigan as part of a collaborative translation of the entirety of Ficciones. Borges's narrator describes how his universe consists of an endless expanse of interlocking hexagon rooms, each of which contains the bare necessities for human survival—and four walls of bookshelves. Though the order and content of the books is random and apparently... full article at wikipedia