The Book of Sand

Borges wrote three or four books that cannot exist, and this is the one that behaves worst. The Library of Babel is infinite but orderly. The Aleph is a point, not a volume. The Book of Sand is an ordinary-looking object — cloth binding, octavo, the weight of a book you might take on a train — that turns out to be unbounded in a way that makes it useless.

The cruelty of the conceit is precise. An infinite book sounds like a gift until you notice what infinity costs you: you cannot return to a page. Every reading is a first reading. The illustration you found this morning is gone, and there is no procedure, no index, no patience long enough, that will bring it back. A book you cannot re-read is not a book. It is a machine for producing loss.

What makes the story hold together is the narrator’s profession. He is a librarian, a man whose entire training is in the retrievability of things, and he is handed the one object that defeats retrieval. His solution is a librarian’s joke and a librarian’s despair at once. He does not burn it — he fears the smoke of an infinite book might suffocate the planet. He shelves it badly. He commits, deliberately, the only sin his profession recognises.

On the readability rating. We are given the seller’s description, the inscription, the behaviour of the page numbers, and a few glimpses of what the narrator sees. We are never given the text. It is not clear the text could be given.