This interactive project features the text of Jorge Luis Borges’ story “The Book of Sand” (as translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni), divided among eight randomly numbered web pages. The text is augmented with static and animated pictures, developed from engravings and photographs in old reference books and other archaic sources.

The site is a hypertext, with a nonlinear structure and dynamic images. Borges’ story is uniquely well-suited for this presentation: it deals with a mysterious book whose innumerable pages are in no discernible order. The story’s reconfiguration into this online form reflects the fictional book’s peculiarly prescient resemblance to the Web itself.

Borges provided an authoritative ordering of the story’s text, but in this presentation, that authority has been removed. Only the reader can decide how to proceed. The puzzle form provides an opportunity to restore the text to its original sequence.

A successful recovery of the primal text provides the reader with an opportunity to join the Borgesian Order of Omnibibliological Kabbalists (B.O.O.K.), by leaving a comment in the site’s guestbook.