{"id":13066,"date":"2013-02-02T01:20:31","date_gmt":"2013-02-02T01:20:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=13066"},"modified":"2022-07-08T11:52:56","modified_gmt":"2022-07-08T10:52:56","slug":"the-library-of-babel-by-erik-desmazieres","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2013\/02\/02\/the-library-of-babel-by-erik-desmazieres\/","title":{"rendered":"The Library of Babel by \u00c9rik Desmazi\u00e8res"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The print work of French artist \u00c9rik Desmazi\u00e8res has featured here on several occasions, and I’ve also had reason to mention more than once his aquatints and etchings which illustrate Jorge Luis Borges’ celebrated short story The Library of Babel<\/em> (1941). The prints were produced in 1997, with a small book edition being published in 2000. Copies of the volume now sell for upwards of $100, and at a mere 36 pages this somewhat exceeds my acquisitiveness threshold; hence this post which gathers some of the better online reproductions, one or two of which have only come to light in the past couple of years.<\/p>\n

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Borges’ description of the architecture of the Universe-size Library is sketchy so Desmazi\u00e8res opens out some of the spaces to give a Piranesian sense of space to what would otherwise be little more than views of the same small rooms and corridors, endlessly repeating. MC Escher could have made something of those infinite perspectives\u2014the hexagonal chambers are the closest to the story descriptions\u2014but the larger rooms convey without words an impression of colossal spaces filled with nothing but people and an infinitude of books. The volumes that Borges describes contain few illustrations but one of them at least would describe this very book. Another would describe this book with a minor variation in one of the plates; another would describe MC Escher’s depictions of the Library, and Piranesi’s, and Salvador Dal\u00ed’s, and yours, and mine, and on and on…<\/p>\n

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Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 The etching and engraving archive<\/a><\/p>\n

Previously on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 Les lieux imaginaires d\u2019\u00c9rik Desmazi\u00e8res<\/a>
\n\u2022 The art of <\/a>\u00c9rik Desmazi\u00e8res<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The print work of French artist \u00c9rik Desmazi\u00e8res has featured here on several occasions, and I’ve also had reason to mention more than once his aquatints and etchings which illustrate Jorge Luis Borges’ celebrated short story The Library of Babel (1941). The prints were produced in 1997, with a small book edition being published in … Continue reading “The Library of Babel by \u00c9rik Desmazi\u00e8res”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8,2,42,27],"tags":[2279,1483,216,139,87],"class_list":["post-13066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-art","category-books","category-borges","tag-erik-desmazieres","tag-jorge-luis-borges","tag-mc-escher","tag-piranesi","tag-salvador-dali"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-3oK","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13066"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13066\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}