The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. In the center of each gallery is a ventilation shaft, bounded by a low railing. From one hexagon one can see the floors above and below—one after another, endlessly.

Excerpt from The Library of Babel from Jorge Luis Borges' FICTIONS, which I can absolutely see being adapted into a graphic novella by the likes of François Schuiten (as an aside, check out this great scene from the film LE DERNIER PLAN directed by Schuiten's regular collaborator Benoit Peeters).

Like all the men of the Library, in my younger days I traveled; I have journeyed in quest of a book, perhaps the catalog of catalogs. Now that my eyes can hardly make out what I myself have written, I am preparing to die, a few leagues from the hexagon where I was born. When I am dead, compassionate hands will throw me over the railing; my tomb will be the unfathomable air, my body will sink for ages, and will decay and dissolve in the wind engendered by my fall, which shall be infinite. I declare that the library is endless.

Beautiful visuals, until Borges starts to break your brain with things like:

(Mystics claim that their ecstasies reveal to them a circular chamber containing an enormous circular book with a continuous spine that goes completely around the walls. But their testimony is suspect, their words obscure. That cyclical book is God.) Let it suffice for the moment that I repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any hexagon and whose circumference is unattainable.

Or maybe it's just too early in the morning for me to be reading this sort of thing.

#reads