That was one theme, as I recall, of Umberto Eco's medieval mystery novel "The Name of the Rose," with its vast, labyrinthine monastic library. Wikipedia notes that Eco's vision of that library was influenced by Jorge Luis Borges' head-trippy short story "The Library of Babel," where the "universe consists of an endless expanse of interlocking hexagonal rooms, each of which contains the bare necessities for human survival — and four walls of bookshelves. Though the order and content of the books is random and apparently completely meaningless, the inhabitants believe that the books contain every possible ordering of just a few basic characters (letters, spaces and punctuation marks). Though the majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent book ever written, or that might ever be written, and every possible permutation or slightly erroneous version of every one of those books. The narrator notes that the library must contain all useful information, including predictions of the future, biographies of any person, and translations of every book in all languages. Conversely, for any given text some language could be devised that would make it readable with any of an infinite number of different contents. Despite — indeed, because of — this glut of information, all books are totally useless to the reader, leaving the librarians in a state of suicidal despair." <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel>
Systematization as snare and illusion!
Carl
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