“‘The Library of Babel’ is a short story by Argentine author and librarianJorge 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-languagetranslations 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. Borges’ narrator describes how his universe consists of an enormous expanse of adjacent hexagonal rooms. In each room, there is an entrance on one wall, the…