ar or pentagonal room is inconceivable. (The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a great circular book, whose spin

e is continuous and which follows the complete circle of the walls; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. This cyclical book is God.) Let it suffic

e now for me to repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccess.

ible. There are five shelves for each of the hexagon's walls; each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of for

ty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black incolor. There are also letters on the spine of each book; these leters do not indicate or prefigure what the page

s will say. I know that this incoherence at one time seemed mysterious. Before summarizing the solution (whose discovery, in spite of its tragic projections, is per

haps the capital fact in history) I wish to recall a few axioms. First: The Library exists ab aeterno. This truth, whose immediate corollary is the future eternity of the world, can