About The Library
These pages are written to be a guide to future explorers and researchers. Welcome! We call this place the Library of Babel. This name was popularised in our community by its depiction in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Library of Babel. Though this space does not follow the normal rules which you or I may be used to, the layout of the Library is rigid and easily followable.The Library consists of a seemingly infinite (or finitely large) number of floors; each of these floors consists of an infinite or finitely large number of “hexes” - white-walled hexagonal rooms. These hexagonal rooms have two doorways each and the remaining four walls are taken up by one bookcase each, making four bookcases.
The Bookshelves
Each bookcase (referred to as a “wall”) has five shelves on it, with each shelf holding thirty-two books. Each book contains an arrangement of twenty-six letters, spaces, full stops, and commas. Every single book we have found seems to be different to every other book. Theoretically, every single possible configuration of a 410-page book that fits the Library’s format is contained somewhere here in the Library.Determining whether the Library is infinite, and therefore contains an infinite number of copies of each book, or finite and extremely large, and therefore contains only one or some finite number of each book, has proven difficult for hopefully obvious reasons.
Bookmarks
(There is a cataloguing system that will help you find certain pages, shelves, walls or hexes. We call this system “bookmarking”.)You may "bookmark" certain hexes, walls, shelves or volumes in order for you to remember where it is and return to it later. These bookmarks require an alphanumeric name. This property seems inherent to the Library itself, or at least predates our own arrival here.
[Annotation from the Librarian: in our representation of the library, you can access bookmarks through the menu in the bottom-right while you are browsing the library. The button to open the menu looks like this:]
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Reaching Other Floors
In the small passageway between hexes there are small sets of stairs which lead up to the floor above. There is also a “central staircase” which connects the entrance and ‘central’ hex via a large, spiral staircase.For safety, we have made it so that a certain action must be undertaken before you can use this central staircase.
Layout
Each hex has two connections to other hexes in the hexagonal plane of a floor. Every hex is visited by a double-armed spiral pattern of exits, with the entrance to the Library occurring at the “centre” of the spiral.We have endeavoured to number these hexes, and have gone so far as to insert plaques into the walls of the nearer hexes of the first floor. The entrance is numbered Hex 0; 1 is placed to the “north”, and 2 to the “south”, then both numberings go clockwise, the “arms” of the spiral wrapping around each other. The hexes are numbered in base 36; after 9, the numbering goes to Hex A, and then Hex B, and so on to Hex Z and then Hex 10.