(In his 1622 Problema Arithmeticum de Rerum Combinationibus, Pierre Guldin formally calculated the number of libraries that would be needed to accommodate all the books that could be written using terms from an alphabet of twenty-three letters. His research generated an answer of Borgesian precision: seventy thousand billion billion words, recorded in 1,000-page volumes with one hundred lines per page and sixty characters per line, would require exactly 8,052,122,350 libraries, each one measuring 132 meters per side.)
