The Library of Babel

"The Library of Babel"
Short story by Jorge Luis Borges
English edition cover, with illustration by Érik Desmazières
Original titleLa biblioteca de Babel
Translatornumerous
CountryArgentina
LanguageSpanish
Genre(s)Fantasy
Publication
Published inEl Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan
PublisherEditorial Sur
Publication date1941
Published in English1962

"The Library of Babel" (Spanish: La biblioteca de 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 and character set.

The story was originally published in Spanish in Borges' 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 translations appeared approximately simultaneously in 1962, one by James E. Irby in a diverse collection of Borges's works titled Labyrinths and the other by Anthony Kerrigan as part of a collaborative translation of the entirety of Ficciones.