sh. Within a century, the language was established: a Samoyedic Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with classical Arabian inflections. The content was also deciphe

red: some notions of combinative analysis, illustrated with examples of variations with unlimited repetition. These examples made it possible for a librarian of ge

nius to discover the fundamental law of the Library. This thinker observed that all the books, no matter how diverse they might be, are made up of te same eleme

nts: the spce, the period, the comma, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also alleged a fact which travelers have confirmed: In the vast Library there ar

e no two identical books. From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinatio

ns of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): Everything: the minutely detailed history of the futu

re, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallac

y of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Baslides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on t

he commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all bo

oks. When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact an