Selections from the Finite Library

The exclusive source for the complete wellspring of all human knowledge, the Selections from the Finite Library. As new volumes are retrieved and processed, they will be made available through this website. 

In this collection which permutes every combination of the received letters is necessarily every book that has ever and could ever exist. It is the complete text of all possible human knowledge. Every novel ever published or imagined. All scientific knowledge now known, or yet to be discovered. The mundane record of every receipt ever printed for every transaction ever made, every diary entry, every love note. A perfect record of your life and of mine, and every imperfect record of the same. And much else besides, including a great deal that has no self-evident first-order meaning. Contemporary estimates put the total number of books ever published at just over one hundred fifty million, this is not even one billionth of the texts of this library.

Each volume of this series is an accurate copy of a text retrieved from the Finite Library. Unlike common pirated books that are vague in form with exaggerated aberrations, we have maintained the layout — about eighty characters per line, forty lines per page, and four hundred and ten pages per volume — and meticulous accuracy. For this popular edition, we have selected a narrow but growing subset which contain notable words and phrases, rubricated and indexed for easy access.

The structural uniformity of each volume belies the bounded distinction possible in the variation of the symbols. With just the few letters and a bit of punctuation, iterated over the delimited horizon of the possible, before long this corpus contains all and exhausts all possibility. When once we labored under the misapprehension that knowledge and meaning are not completable, we are now faced with the liberatory fact that both are finite. These twenty-nine symbols raised to the power of one million three hundred and two thousand are all the books it takes to contain everything. There is no point in looking anywhere else anymore. In these variations, we can take solace that if all of knowledge is finite — as it must be since it is contained here — all is knowable.

In the future we will ask ourselves where the written word was ever found before this discovery. Happily, we will soon face the reality that the meager creativity and minuscule industry of humanity will be overwhelmed by this single source. The library, as it approaches completion, contains all and in containing excludes all that came after it.

Everything is already here, and always has been.

Come take a look.

— S. Etaoin, Editor