“The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries”*…
The Tower of Babel, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563)
Jonathan Basile, a Brooklyn author and Borgesian Man of the Book, taught himself programming so that he could recreate Borges’ Universal Library [the Library of Babel, which “contained all books”] as a website. The results are confounding. A true site-as-labyrinth, Basile’s creation is an attempt to write and publish every story conceivable (and inconceivable) to man. In the process, Basile encountered new philosophical conundrums, French rappers, and unheard-of porno search strings. The possibilities, after all, are endless…
Browse the Universal Library here; read more of Basile’s prodigious project here.
* Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel” [“La Biblioteca de Babel”]
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As we renew our Library cards, we might recall that it was on this date in 1667 that John Milton sold the rights to Paradise Lost to printer/publisher Samuel Simmons for £10. Milton, who’s worked for Cromwell, was on the outs in those early days of the Restoration. (Indeed, Simmons kept his name off the title page [below], naming only his sellers.)
That original edition was structured into 10 sections (“books”). Milton revised his work and reordered it into 12 books, the form we know today; it was published in the year of his death, 1674. While his motive may well have been, as some critics have suggested, to emulate the structure of Virgil’s Aeneid, a second payday probably also figured in.
