"The Invisible Library is a collection of books that only appear in other books. Within the library's catalog you will find imaginary books, pseudobiblia, artifictions, fabled tomes, libris phantastica, and all manner of books unwritten, unread, unpublished, and unfound..."

Jorge Luis Borges and Douglas Adams are the two authors which popped out at me, having between them imagined no less than 35 fictional books throughout their works (notable fictions include Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Borges' First Encyclopedia of Tlon) . Borges himself believed that a more accurate depiction of an idea could be delivered from imagining a book than from actually writing one! Indeed in his short fable, The Library of Babel, Borges imagined an infinite library containing every possible 410-page text, so that throughout the library every book ever written, or ever to be written in the entire universe exists.

[It has been noted since that if you take an infinite, patternless number (for instance Pi / π = 3.14159 26535 89793 23846.... etc. ) and you convert each of the numbers into letters using hexidecimal code, notes on a musical scale or any other such coding system, then contained within the infinity of π are all the books ever to be written, all the songs ever to be composed, every digital TV/Radio/Internet broadcast ever to be made, the genetic information about every creature ever to have existed and so on... To make matters even more mind boggling each of these patterns is repeated an infinite number of times in a infinite number of alternate sequences off into infinity.... Sweetly enough my birthday, March 14, marks Pi Day which is celebrated by many lovers of π. A day to think about fictions indeed...]

The Invisible Library is an interesting website all in all, but it fails to give much information on each book in the catalogue, something I'd really love to be able to browse. Click above for histories of the fictions within infinities within fictions...

Categories: Fiction, Links, Books, Fantasy, Jorge Luis Borges, Douglas Adams, Infinity, Pi, Maths, Mathematics, Philosophy, π

Archived Link