Library of Babel
Medium: Print Tools: Adobe InDesign
This booklet is a typographic exploration of Jorge Luis Borges' short story The Library of Babel, a classic work of ergodic literature.
Borges’ imagined library, containing every possible permutation of 22 letters, spaces, commas, and periods, represents both infinite knowledge and the exhaustion of information.
I was compelled to work with this text because of its recursive nature, its paradoxical relationship between order and chaos, and its commentary on the search for meaning in an overwhelming sea of information.
With the constraints (1 typeface for body text, no color, no images), I designed a booklet that reflects the story’s themes of infinity, recursion, and the search for meaning.
To emphasize the library’s endless gibberish and the idea that it contains every book ever conceived or yet to be imagined, I encrypted the booklet’s entire text using a Caesar cipher. This transforms the content into nonsense, reinforcing the theme of linguistic overload while making the title appear as one long, indecipherable stream of information.
Inside the booklet, text blocks are arranged to resemble towers or structures, mirroring the vast, hexagonal chambers of Borges' fictional library.
As the reader progresses, pull quotes begin to disrupt the order of the text blocks.
These intrusions introduce a sporadic and chaotic essence, evoking the experience of wandering through the Library of Babel—where one moment might reveal profound insight and the next, complete nonsense.
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