Somewhere in the universe, there is a shelf of neatly organized books with titles made of nonsense. One of these books contains 410 pages of uncapitalized English words strung together in no intelligible order. On page 26 of this particular book , about halfway down, bookended between “ holons ” and “ linkman “, is a 26-word couplet that my 4-year-old daughter will attempt to recite in her preschool’s Christmas pageant. Somewhere else, on a different shelf, is another book: this one contains a precise transcription, down to the syllable, of how my daughter will adorably mangle those 26 words onstage when her cue arrives.

If this scenario sounds familiar, it’s because the 20th-century Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges imagined it in his mindbending short story “The Library of Babel”:

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries… The Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): Everything… the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.

It’s a philosophically dizzying piece of literature. But what if it were real—what if someone designed a digital product that faithfully replicates Borges’s Library?

Novelist Jonathan Basile did just that. When I wrote “somewhere in the universe,” I meant it literally: Basile’s version of the Library actually exists on his home computer in Brooklyn, New York. Other publications have noted the impressive programming that went into realizing this project. But I was more interested in Basile’s UX thinking. If good design is all about embracing constraints, what are the constraints for the design problem of “displaying every possible book on demand”?

Others have attempted to instantiate the Library online, but Basile’s version stands out for its elegant design, from the medieval-looking illustrations of the hexagonal rooms right down to the fonts (“the texts would all have the exact same dimensions according Borges, so I knew they’d look best in monospace,” Basile says).

But Basile didn’t stop there. His Library comes complete with an onboarding experience (or “reference hex”, as he calls it), plain-English interactions (you can browse, search, or shuffle), and even a traditional “breadcrumb” navigation scheme (you can view individual pages or zoom in and out to bookshelves, walls, or rooms).

“The browse page is the anchor of the user experience. It makes the user almost feel like they’re interacting with a real library,” Basile explains. “I wanted to create a sense of physical architecture in the user’s mind by visually representing the hexagons, walls, shelves, books and pages in an internally consistent way—making it as easy as possible to see where you ‘are’ in the library. Otherwise it’d all feel very thin, or like a prank—you wouldn’t get a sense of the vastness.”