“Jorge Luis Borges in The Library of Babel imagines a hellish archive of books—a macrocosmic columbarium, whose infinite chambers provide an exhaustive repository for all the permutations of the alphabet. Inside this endless library, nonsensical texts so drastically outnumber any intelligible books that a coherent phrase must seem tantamount to a wondrous mishap. Poets within such a prisonhouse can no longer contribute anything innovative to literature, because literature itself has already anticipated and inventoried in advance all the anagrammatic combinations of every text” (blurb on Blurb).

The librarian who narrates Borges’s story mentions five books by name: LXUM,LKWC; mcv; The Plaster Cramp; Axaxaxas Mlo and The Combed Thunderclap. They have been reproduced by Christian Bök according to the general specifications (410 pages, forty lines of text per page, and eighty characters of text per line) as well as the specific features (title, style, and phrases appearing in the book) as reported by the narrator. For example, in reference to the first volume, he speaks of it as containing “a mere labyrinth of letters, but the next-to-last page says ‘Oh time thy pyramids.’” Another volume, the narrator reports, “consists of only ‘the letters MCV, perversely repeated from the first line to the last,’ like a cryptogram corresponding to no language” (blurb on Blurb).

Bök’s books are based on the algorithmic representation of the Library of Babel by Jonathan Basile, who has written the code to generate the library according to Borges’s imagination as well as creating an interface to search for words or phrases.

The books are set in Panoptica, “a font designed by Nick Shinn, who has created a set of monospaced characters, according to the ‘prisoner’s constraint,’ meaning that none of the letters have either ascenders or descenders” (blurb on Blurb).

All five books of Bök’s series contain no explanatory text, no title pages, and no author name. They are limited to an edition of twenty-five copies, after which they will be discontinued, with an updated note on how many books are left of each edition in the description text on Blurb. Because of this artificial limitation, the author can promote his books as “[a] collectible item, perfect as a gift for bibliophiles, who might love the work of Borges” (blurb on Blurb). The books were also advertised by Bök via Twitter. He also posted there when a “print run” of a title like LXUM,LKWC was sold out.