There’s also no effective way to organize so many volumes of worthless dribble, so in the story, the librarians who maintain the collection quickly lose their minds trying to reign in the unfathomably large amount of nonsensical books. Many of the permutations of alphabetic characters are totally random strings of letters, so a large portion of the library’s books are pure nonsense.

The only problem is that, in addition to the complete works of Shakespeare, Voltaire, and every other author who has ever been born the library also contains a staggeringly large amount of incomprehensible gibberish. Because the collection contains every possible combination of characters, the library holds not only every book that has ever been written, but also every book that could ever be written.

The story is centered around fictional library that contains every possible combination of all the letters of in the alphabet, in a massive collection of 410-page novels. Roman Boed/FlickrIn his infamous short story The Library of Babel, author Jorge Luis Borges presents readers with an interesting thought experiment.