Monochrome, Perfect-bound Paperback, 210 x 148mm, 140pp

A collection of drawings made in response to Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Library of Babel”. Every drawing is constrained by the first page of Borges’ nine-page story. As each book in the library of Babel is unreadable, so each drawing responds to a visual element of the text or the process of reading the first page – most are completely asemic, a few are tantalisingly close to recognisable language.

“Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘The Library of Babel’ describes an imaginary infinite library, one that holds every possible text. With Promise the Infinite: Drawing out Babel, Rachel Smith has created a beautiful slice of the infinite; a veritable guidebook for the future of reading. Smith’s cornucopia pours forth eloquent solutions across genre: haiku, visual poems, painting, digital responses – an inspiring feast.”

­— Derek Beaulieu

“Rachel Smith’s response to Jorge Luis Borges’ infinite library imagines language as asemic babble. In Smith’s hands, the first page of Borges’ story is variously redacted, pixilated, re-coded, re-woven, collaged, lineated, water-splotched, negative-spaced, and continually re-defined. These actions materialise language and rehearse what Borges’ contemporary Roman Jakobson would call ‘intersemiotic translation’—that is, the translation of one sign system (fiction) into another (visual and asemic writing). Smith’s book provides us with a sample of limitless proliferation in a library of endless possibility.”

—Peter Jaeger