I suppose this has become something of a series of posts inspired by Borges’s Selected Non-Fictions. There was “The Metaphysics of Novels and Magic”, “Borges and the Essay”, and now—what is this?
Selected Non-Fictions ends with an intriguing chapter. It consists of two lists of stories and books, titled A Personal Library and The Library of Babel, and a couple handfuls of introductions that Borges wrote for some of the entries. They’re two anthologies that Borges edited in his lifetime: A Personal Library is, as you might guess, nebulous but very Borges, full of ancient and philosophical texts like Herodotus’s Histories; The Library of Babel is a collection of magical/fantasy stories, named after what is probably his most famous story.
The story behind A Personal Library is pretty straightforward. Borges was tasked with curating a list of 100 books and writing an introduction for each of them. Tragically, he died of liver cancer before he could finish, so the anthology only contains 74 titles. But that makes the collection his final work—fitting for a man who was simultaneously a fiction writer, a critic, and a librarian. You can see the full list of titles here (there’s also a Goodreads list, although it doesn’t seem to match the true list exactly). Here’s an except from the prologue:
Over time, one’s memory forms a disparate library, made of books or pages whose reading was a pleasure and which one would like to share. The texts of that personal library are not necessarily famous. The reason is clear. The professors, who are the ones who dispense fame, are interested less in beauty than in literature’s dates and changes, and in the prolix analysis of books that have been written for that analysis, not for the joy of the reader.
This series is intended to bring such pleasure. I will not select titles according to my literary habits, or a certain tradition, or a certain school or nation or era. I once said, “Others brag of the books they've managed to write; I brag of the books I've managed to read.” I don’t know if I am a good writer, but I think I am an excellent reader, or in any case, a sensitive and grateful one. I would like this library to be as diverse as the unsatisfied curiosity that has led me, and continues to lead me, in my exploration of so many languages and literatures.
[…]
A book is a thing among things, a volume lost among the volumes that populate the indifferent universe, until it meets its reader, the person destined for its symbols. What then occurs is that singular emotion called beauty, that lovely mystery which neither psychology nor criticism can describe. “The rose has no why” said Angelus Silesius; centuries later, Whistler declared, “Art happens.”
I hope that you will be the reader these books await.
It would be overly grandiose to say something like “I will make it my personal life’s mission to read every book in this list.”* So I won’t say anything like that.
The context of The Library of Babel is a little bit more mysterious. For starters, there are actually references to it throughout the essays in Selected Non-Fictions; you’re reading these essays, displaced by decades, and Borges casually refers to “The Library of Babel.” You think at first that he is referring to the impossible library from the short story. But it is mentioned enough times that I eventually figured out that he was referring to an anthology he edited that shares the name, and I guess I was sort of anticipating its full face to appear somehow the whole time I was making my through the book.
Then, curiously, the list of titles in The Library of Babel provided in Selected Non-Fictions doesn’t refer to individual stories, but only other collections—so, for example, the list includes “The Thousand and One Nights according to Burton” as well as “The Thousand and One Nights according to Galland.” I don’t think Borges intended for you to read two different translations of The Thousand and One Nights back to back—he must have selected a couple individual stories from each translation based on how he felt each translation serves each story. But why does the list provided in Selected Non-Fictions only refer to editions of The Thousand and One Nights, and not the specific stories?
The book gives no answer, but by this point I was thinking: Okay, so, where can I get physical copies of these collections?—I’m ready to go even deeper into Borges’s beautiful head. I want to read all the stories Borges hand-picked. I want to spend some time in his “personal library,” in The Library of Babel.
*But it appears that this is not possible, or at least not completely possible. I’m not sure if A Personal Library was ever actually published as a physical set, and the original publication of A Library of Babel is out of print, and also was only printed in Spanish. Many of the individual stories from both collections are relatively unknown, out of print, and/or were never translated into English. There is of course also the issue of the near-useless granularity of the list provided for A Library of Babel—but I managed to find this excellent article and resource from Grant Munroe, who compiled a complete list of titles in The Library of Babel, and provides links to texts in English when possible, which is as close to a complete digital reproduction of the anthology as an English-reader is going to get. Says Munroe:
Unfortunately, a good number of the stories Borges selected—I’d guess about a quarter—either lack an English translation (Bloy, Papini, Meyrink, de Alarcón) or are out of print. This, to me, is a great shame; I’d like to read every single one, especially those by Meyrink and Bloy. The stories that I’ve been able to find online, however, have been hyperlinked. […] Having read nearly all of the linked stories, I can (with only a few exceptions) give them each my highest recommendation. Not surprisingly, Borges assembled a fun, brilliant, polyglot collection.
I also found this blog post from John Coulthart, which displays the cover art for many of the volumes in the original publication of The Library of Babel, which are just incredible. Here’s one of them:
Coulthart identifies the publisher of this Library of Babel set, Franco Maria Ricci, which name I promptly Googled, and I am glad I did.
FMC’s website is full of beautiful museum-worthy editions of books, including the original edition of the Library of Babel series, with a little more context on its publication. From what I can gather, each individual book in the collection could have been a single story or a selection of stories from a larger volume (so there was a volume in The Library of Babel titled The Thousand and One Nights According to Galland, but it could just has easily have been titled Selections from Galland’s The Thousand and One Nights). The list in Selected Non-Fictions simply refers to the title of each volume in The Library of Babel, and doesn’t bother to provide sub-items for the individual stories within each volume… leaving sleuths like Munroe to be forced to figure that out with a Spanish-English dictionary and some Google-fu.
The second edition of the complete The Library of Babel series is for sale on FMC’s website for a little over $4,000… and I would consider buying it if only I could read Italian.
One of the things that came up in my exploration of FMC’s website was this book, which immediately grabbed my attention; it has the word “CODEX” in gold type on a black cover, below it the word “SERAPHINIANUS,” and below that a very strange image indeed.
You may be familiar with it. Codex Serpaphinianus is a fictional encyclopedia, written in an imaginary language and full of strange illustrations, similar to the one in the Borges story from which this publication gets its name (if that tells you anything about how much I like a fictional encyclopedia). It was created by Italian artist Luigi Serafini and published by FMC in 1981. It inspired writing by Roland Barthes, Italo Calvino, and Douglas Hofstadter; as well as the efforts of countless cryptographers, both amateur and expert. Here’s a great blog post by Matt Bluemink that relates an exploration of the Codex while under the influence of psychedelics, and connecting it to Borges and Calvino.
The edition for sale on FMC’s website is about $1000. There are other editions for sale on Amazon in the range of $80-$200, but they aren’t quite as striking and mysterious as the black one.
Oh well. I guess my library will remain unadorned with that thrilling gold lettering.
There is a WIRED interview with Serafini from 2013, and the article includes a few glimpses into the weird world of the book.
Interestingly, in the interview Serafini refers to Codex Seraphinianus as a “proto-blog,” which at first seems absurd.
WIRED: You said that the Codex is a sort of proto-blog. Why?
Serafini: I was trying to reach out to my fellow people, just like bloggers do. There is a connection between Codex Seraphinianus and digital culture. I was somehow anticipating the net by sharing my work with as many people as possible. I wanted the Codex to be published as a book because I wanted to step out of the closed circle of art galleries.
I am reminded of Henrik Karlsson’s fantastic essay, which claims: “A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people.” Henrik has this beautiful and nuanced view of what a blog is, not merely a place to put up amateur writing, but a refined methodology for connecting with people interested in the same things as you.
Serafini says he “was trying to reach out to his fellow people,” and he “wanted to step out of the closed circle of art galleries.” This is what a blog does, and his sentiment ties in nicely with what we discussed in “Borges and the Essay;” bringing the essay down from the ivory towers of academia and glossy magazines, into the ancient commons, the essay-hungry cosmopolitan populace for which Borges wrote his essays.
Reach your fellow people, bring them to the ancient commons, Induct them into Orbis Tertius: