Sheet A-101 · Plan and interior elevations

The Library of Bavel

ספריית בבל

Jorge Luis Borges imagined a library of identical hexagonal galleries without end. This plan lights nine of them. Each holds one medium that carried Jewish text, and its four shelved walls hold Marshall McLuhan’s four laws of media, so the shape of the room tells you how to read it. Bavel is Hebrew for Babylon, home of the Babylonian Talmud.

Drawing: Plan of the lit galleries, with each gallery’s walls unfolded
Scale: One gallery to one medium
After: Borges, “The Library of Babel” (1941); McLuhan, Laws of Media (1988)
Today’s page

Plan

Nine lit galleries in an endless honeycomb

Key

How the architecture carries the argument

General notes

Borges gave each wall five shelves of 32 books, each book 410 pages of 40 lines, about 80 characters to a line. The elevations draw every wall to that count.
His alphabet has 25 symbols: 22 letters, a space, a comma and a period. Hebrew has exactly 22 letters, so these shelves use the alef-bet.
Sefer Yetzirah counts 231 “gates,” every pairing of two of the 22 letters, and imagines the world built from their combinations.
The readings on each wall apply McLuhan’s tetrad to cases he did not discuss himself. They are this library’s interpretations.

The infinite shelves

Every possible page has an address

Every possible page stands somewhere in Borges’s library. Type a line in the library’s 25 symbols and it returns the shelf address of a page that contains it. The address runs to almost 3,000 characters, nearly as long as the page itself.

Your line

Try

A reversible formula links every page of 40 lines by 80 characters to exactly one address, so an address always leads back to the same page. Final letters are stored as their base forms and restored on display; vowel points are dropped.