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The Library of Babel: Difference between revisions
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* The Infinity Library of ''[[Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha]]'', has all the publications and data of every world, and has been described as containing the memories of the universe. It's so huge that nobody has catalogued even a small fraction of it, and people wanting to use it for research often form ''multi-week expeditions'' to do so. These are people who can use search magic to speed things up and read several books at once, mind you.
** There's a common bit of fanon that suggests that the Infinity Library is actually connected to one or more of the other entries on this list. When reading Nanoha fanfics ([[Sturgeon's Law|the good ones, at least]]), any scene involving Yuuno and the Library has about a one-in-four chance of featuring a cameo appearance by an oddly intelligent <s> monkey</s> [[Discworld|orangutan]].
* ''[[Mahou Sensei Negima]]'' has Library Island, a city-sized underground library so massive that Mahora actually has a school club dedicated to exploring it, with standard club equipment consisting of ''rock climbing gear''. It's known to contain books that make the holder more intelligent, golems, dragons, lakes, ''waterfalls''<ref>that don't cause any water damage to the books behind them!</ref> the roots of [[The World Tree]], and lots of booby traps. [https://web.archive.org/web/20090220123746/http://www.mangafox.com/page/manga/read/71/mahou_sensei_negima/chapter.11056/page.14
* The Library of Spirits ("Fantasy Library") in the ''[[Read or Die|Read Or Dream]]'' manga has every book ever written, as reading material for the dead. However, it appears on Earth for 1 hour every 10 years, and the living may borrow one book for a 10 year period.
** ''[[R.O.D the TV]]'' features one of the closed stack libraries mentioned in the real life section. It doesn't look as amazing as some examples of this trope, but damned if that isn't a lot of books.
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==
* ''[[Fables]]'' contains a massive library so large that the foyer is large enough to be a seat of government and contain objects of mythical size (Excalibur has literally become as big as the legend of Arthur). Oddly even though it belongs to all sorts of magical creatures it's never implied to be magical in any way except for its extreme size.
* The Library of Dream in ''[[The Sandman]]'' is full of those books that were conceived by their authors but never written or completed. This not only includes things like [[G. K. Chesterton]]'s ''The Man Who Was October'', or [[P. G. Wodehouse|PG Wodehouse]]'s ''[[Canon Welding|Psmith and Jeeves]]'', but an awful lot of books like ''That romantic comedy sci-fi thriller I used to think about on the bus to work''.
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** Appears again in Superman's trip to Limbo in ''[[Final Crisis]]''. Except this time, Ultraman somehow manages to lift it and learn about {{spoiler|Mandrakk}}.
* The library of the Crystal Ballroom in ''Nexus'' contains all the historical memory of (at least the known) universe.
== Film ==
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** Death's Library is a variation - every person's life story writes itself into a book somewhere on his shelves. As you go back, the histories are written on scrolls, then animal skins, then stone slabs... One character asks Death's daughter (adopted) what came before the slabs, because some people would "quite like to know". She replies that she didn't get that far, as she was running out of candles.
*** Which leads to a humorous scene where the protagonists find someone's book and upon going to the last page, are tipped off that he is sneaking up behind them.
*** They then temporarily incapacitate the sneaker by [[Throw the Book At Them|dropping
** Death also has a more straight version of this; at one point he is looking for information on the Discworld's version of [[Death World|Australia]], XXXX. He walks into the library and asks for information on the dangerous animals, and is [[Rummage Fail|buried in books]]. He then changes the request to the ''non''-dangerous ones, and one sheet of paper floats down, reading [[Everything Trying to Kill You|"some of the sheep"]].
* This is [[Older Than They Think]]—there is a short story by Kurd Lasswitz, ''The Universal Library'', exploring this same idea and written in 1901, decades before Borges.
* The Great Library in the ''[[Thursday Next]]'' books, which contains every book that will ever be written, and a few more besides.
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* In Clifford Simak's "The Goblin Reservation", a crystal planet containing all the knowledge of the previous universe (the one before the last Big Bang) is offered as payment for the book's [[McGuffin]].
▲== Live Action TV ==
* The Library, so big it doesn't even need a name, just a The, from ''[[Doctor Who]]'' in "Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead."
** The Library is the entire planet. In fact, the moon is a virus checker. The Library {{spoiler|stored all the souls from all the people in The Library in The Library's computer core when Vashta Nerada began to kill everyone. It even gave them ''simulated lives''. }}
*** On a related note, the [[Doctor Who Expanded Universe]] [[Big Finish]] audio "The One Doctor" features Mentos, a being created for a game show that remarkably resembles The Weakest Link. It can answer any question by going back in time and finding the answer, essentially acting as a [[Library of Babel]]. [[Logic Bomb|It was only defeated by asking one question: What can't it answer?]]
* The school library in ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'' is an approximation of this, with all those arcane references back in the rear stacks.
** ''[[Angel]]'' has the templates, seemingly empty books that can retrieve any and all of the works in the extensive library of [[Occult Law Firm|Wolfram & Hart]].
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* ''[[Warehouse 13]]'': Myka discovers that the eponymous [[Secret Government Warehouse|Warehouse]] also holds a massive library containing first editions of everything ever printed.
{{quote|'''Pete:''' Does that include comic books?}}
== Tabletop Games ==
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** Bonus points for Patchouli, since she's not just the librarian, but also the author of an unspecified proportion of the books in her library, and probably the overwhelming majority of the magic books in the library, given the esoteric rules for wizardry in the ''Touhou'' 'verse.
** It is also worth noting, just to get a sense of its dimensions, that in the stage you fight in the Voile Library, it is possible for you have a roughly five-minute-long aerial battle over the bookshelves traveling in one direction without ever reaching the end.
*** Fanon has run away with the notion of Voile as a repository for nearly every book every written. Case in point: the doujin anime ''Musou Kakyou: A Summer Day's Dream'' goes as far as to depict the library with a volume of ''[http://rainbowsphere.oniichannoecchi.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/snapshot20090108231943.jpg Wikipedia]''{{Dead link}}
** Canonically, it's size is unspecified but large, it mostly has grimoires, many written by Patchouli, and there's a handful of random books from the outside world. Considering that grimoires are illegible to anyone that can't use them, the library is completely useless to the vast majority of characters.
* The Dark People from ''[[The Longest Journey]]'' seek to obtain every book ever written, which they store in their library, located on a moving island whose location is a secret for but a few.
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== Real Life ==
* The Internet itself could probably be the closest thing to a Real Life example, even the part about most of it being nonsense or forbidden knowledge is there with the networks and web databases that can't be accessed normally.
** Sites like Amazon and Google Books allow users to look inside select pages of millions upon millions of books, which could be thought of as a sort of immense library.
* Pretty much all of the developed nations have national libraries: tremendous collections of books, articles, magazines, and other printed/recorded material. The libraries of large research universities also contain vast collections, often including priceless historical artifacts.
** Since the Library of Congress is used to store publications for the U.S. Copyright office, virtually every work copyrighted in the U.S. is sent there, with just under half being added to the permanent collection. That amounts to an additional 10,000 items ''per day.''
* While nowhere near as well known as the library of Alexandria, the House of Wisdom, located in ancient Baghdad, was for its time the largest repository of knowledge in the world and actually held a great number of
** It was said that when the Mongols sacked Baghdad, the Tigris River ran black with ink from the scrolls they dumped in it.
* Einstein spoke of a "vast library, stacked from floor to ceiling with books in many different languages, arranged in an order we do not understand, but can dimly suspect". He called it the world.
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