29 November 2025

Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian author,  wrote a short story entitled, ‘The Book of Sand’. A stranger knocked on his door in Buenos Aires. He was dressed in grey, carrying a grey suitcase. He was a foreigner, a Scotsman from the Orkney Islands.

He was selling Bibles. Borges had no need of them. He had in his possession several including a Vulgate and a Wycliffe. ‘Are you religious?’ he asked the stranger. ‘I am a Presbyterian.’ he replied. He had an unusual book to show Borges.

It was set out in double columns like a Bible and divided into verses. There were page numbers in the top right hand corners. He opened the book. One page was numbered 40,514 and the opposite page was 999. On one, there was an illustration of an anchor.

When Borges tried to find the illustration again, he couldn’t. ‘Every time I tried, a number of pages came between the cover and my thumb. It was as if they kept growing from the book.’ He could neither find the first nor the last page. The number of pages in the book was no more and no less than infinite.

It was called the Book of Sand ‘because neither the book nor the sand has any beginning or end'.  Borges bought it in exchange for his pay check and the Wycliffe. ‘To the luck of owning it was added the fear of having it stolen.’ He became a recluse and an insomniac.  He determined to get rid of it.

He thought of burning it but he was afraid that burning an infinite book ‘might likewise prove infinite and suffocate the planet with smoke’. Instead, he hid it the stacks of The Argentine National Library. An infinite book in a finite space contrasts with the Bible, a finite book with infinite depth,  unsearchable wisdom.