Babel Nexus Index — Explore Public-Domain Classics as a Connected Map

What it is — your gateway to the public domain’s greatest works

In one sentence: it's a website where classic books live in connected rooms — you click from room to room, and when a book catches your eye, you read the full text free.

Why this instead of a search box: Wikipedia summarizes, search engines list, and library databases make you type the right query before showing anything. The Index inverts all three — you explore knowledge spatially instead of searching textually, so books you didn't know to search for find you. It's powered by the same deep archives (Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, Wikisource), but designed for intuitive, visual discovery: the connections between subjects are drawn on screen, not buried in a results page.

Two inventions make that possible, and you won't find them in any other library: a Knowledge Gallery is a subject rendered as a room — its classic works hang on the walls like paintings, and its doorways lead to the subjects it historically fed or grew from, so "related reading" is something you walk through rather than a list at the bottom of a page. The Cortex Map is the opposite view: an entire floor of knowledge drawn as one clickable diagram — every gallery and every connection visible at once — so you can see the shape of human thought the way a traditional catalog never shows it, then click any point on the map and drop straight into that room.

Here is how you use it: pick a subject room (each one is a themed shelf of classic books whose copyright has expired), step through the doors that connect it to related subjects, and open any book's complete text in one click via Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, or Wikipedia. You can also ask the AI Oracle questions in plain language, and build and share your own reading trails through the books that struck you. At the center of every room, a spiral staircase leads down to the next floor.

The design realizes two famous visions of navigable knowledge. The doors between rooms are Vannevar Bush's "associative trails" from As We May Think (The Atlantic, 1945) — his Memex, made clickable — and the hexagonal rooms themselves are the architecture of Borges' Library of Babel, made walkable. A century-old dream of connected knowledge, running in your browser. Every full text is served by the canonical public archives: Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive.

Get smart answers powered by the AI Oracle: ask any question in plain language — "trace the lineage from Euclid to Riemann," "what does the Archive say about memory?" — and it answers from the books in the collection, pointing you to the real works behind every answer. No special syntax, no setup: just type your question and follow where it leads.

Level I — The Sciences: trace scientific thought back to its founding texts

The Sciences — explore the foundational texts of every major discipline. This is the top floor and the natural starting point: 21 galleries where you can read the very works that founded mathematics, physics, biology, medicine, and their neighbors, each one shelved beside the fields it influenced.

• Mathematics — Euclid, Archimedes, Newton, Riemann, Gauss
• Physics — Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Einstein, Curie
• Astronomy — Galileo, Kepler, Eddington, Clerke
• Chemistry — Lavoisier, Mendeleev, public-domain treatises
• Biology — Darwin, Mendel, Wallace, Linnaeus
• Botany — Linnaeus, Hooker, Mendel
• Earth Science — Lyell, Wegener, Suess
• Ecology — early ecology and biogeography texts
• Oceanography — Challenger expedition reports, Maury
• Medicine — Vesalius, Harvey, Osler, Nightingale
• Natural History — Pliny, Buffon, Humboldt
• Geography and Exploration — Strabo, Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, Columbus, Cook, Humboldt, Shackleton
• Engineering — Bush's As We May Think, Carnot, Edison
• Logic — Aristotle, Boole, Frege, Russell & Whitehead's Principia Mathematica
• Philosophy of Science — Bacon, Mill, Whewell, Mach, Poincaré
• Psychology — James, Wundt, Freud (public-domain editions)
• Statistics — Bayes, Quetelet, Galton, Pearson
• Economics — Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Mill, Veblen
• Handicraft — Thérèse de Dillmont's Encyclopedia of Needlework, Edward Johnston on Writing & Illuminating, & Lettering, Butterick, Miss Lambert, Vinciolo, Vecellio (needlework, knitting, dressmaking, lettering, and the applied arts)
• Ceramic Arts — Marryat, Chaffers, and Jewitt on the wares of the world, Hobson's Chinese Pottery and Porcelain, Petrie and Richter on ancient pottery, Meteyard's Life of Josiah Wedgwood, and the studio manuals of Binns, Cox, and White (pottery, porcelain, glaze, and the potter's craft)
• Knowledge Itself — Bacon's Novum Organum, Locke, d'Alembert's Encyclopédie preface, Dewey, Peirce, Wells's World Brain (the meta-epistemology shelf, and the bridge to Level II)
• The Crimson Hexagon — a hidden hexagonal gallery, unlocked after visiting seven above; a Borges easter egg

Level II — Literature & Art: follow the great stories to their first tellings

Literature & Art — classic stories and the first works of every genre. One floor down from the sciences, 23 galleries hold the epics, first novels, first plays, and first mysteries: the literary substrate from which formal knowledge later crystallized. Reach Level II via the spiral staircase at the center of any Level I hexagonal gallery, or via the dashboard tile.

• Epics — Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Beowulf, Mahabharata, Ramayana, Gilgamesh, Shahnameh, Three Kingdoms, Kalevala, Argonautica, Thebaid, Eddas, Volsung Saga, Táin, Arabian Nights, Dede Korkut
• First Novels — Tale of Genji, Callirhoe, Satyricon, Golden Ass, Kadambari, Don Quixote, Le Morte d'Arthur, Beware the Cat, Oroonoko, Robinson Crusoe, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan
• Wisdom Literature — Maxims of Ptahhotep, Instructions of Shuruppak, Instructions of Amenemhat, The Debate Between Winter and Summer, Poem of the Righteous Sufferer, Story of Aḥikar, Counsels of Wisdom, Instructions of Šūpê-amēli, Instructions of Kagemni, Nig-Nam Nu-Kal
• First Plays — Aeschylus (Persians, Suppliants, Seven Against Thebes), Sophocles (Antigone, Ajax), Euripides (Alcestis, Cyclops), Aristophanes (Acharnians)
• First Mystery Novels and Stories — Poe (Rue Morgue, Marie Rogêt, Purloined Letter), Wilkie Collins (Woman in White, Moonstone), Charles Felix (Notting Hill Mystery), Gaboriau (Lerouge Case), Seeley Regester (Dead Letter), Anna Katharine Green (Leavenworth Case), Stevenson (Jekyll and Hyde), Fergus Hume (Mystery of a Hansom Cab), Conan Doyle (A Study in Scarlet)
• First Science Fiction and Proto Science Fiction Stories — Lucian (A True Story), Bacon (New Atlantis), Kepler (Somnium), Godwin (Man in the Moone), Cyrano de Bergerac (Moon, Sun), Cavendish (Blazing World), Swift (Gulliver's Travels), Holberg (Niels Klim), Shelley (Frankenstein, The Last Man)
• Fiction Set in Libraries — Irving (Mutability of Literature), Flaubert (Bibliomania), Nodier (Le Bibliomane), Hawthorne (A Virtuoso's Collection), Anatole France (Sylvestre Bonnard, Penguin Island), Henry James (The Aspern Papers), Eugene Field (Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac), Pearson (Old Librarian's Almanack), M. R. James (Tractate Middoth)
• First Romance Novels — Achilles Tatius (Leucippe and Clitophon), Heliodorus (Aethiopica), Longus (Daphnis and Chloe), Xenophon of Ephesus (Ephesian History), Richardson (Pamela), Cao Xueqin (Dream of the Red Chamber), Austen (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice), Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre), Georgette Heyer (The Black Moth)
• First Horror Stories and Novels — Pliny the Younger (Athenodorus and the Haunted House), Walpole (Castle of Otranto), Beckford (Vathek), Radcliffe (Mysteries of Udolpho), Lewis (The Monk), Shelley (Frankenstein), Polidori (The Vampyre), Maturin (Melmoth the Wanderer), Hugo (Notre-Dame de Paris), Poe (Usher, Tell-Tale Heart, Black Cat, Raven), Le Fanu (Carmilla, Uncle Silas), Stevenson (Jekyll and Hyde), Wilde (Dorian Gray), Stoker (Dracula), Leroux (Phantom of the Opera)
• First Fantasy Literature — Apuleius (Golden Ass), Arabian Nights, Boccaccio (Decameron), Malory (Le Morte d'Arthur), Spenser (Faerie Queene), Bunyan (Pilgrim's Progress), Swift (Gulliver's Travels), MacDonald (Phantastes, Princess and the Goblin, Lilith), Carroll (Alice's Adventures, Looking-Glass), Haggard (King Solomon's Mines, She), Morris (Well at the World's End), Baum (Wizard of Oz), Barrie (Peter Pan), Dunsany (Gods of Pegāna, King of Elfland's Daughter), Eddison (Worm Ouroboros), Mirrlees (Lud-in-the-Mist)
• Wordless Novels — Frans Masereel (Mon Livre d'Heures, Die Stadt), Hermann-Paul (Danse Macabre), Otto Nückel (Destiny), Lynd Ward (God's Man), Milt Gross (He Done Her Wrong), Freyhold (Tiere) — the seven public-domain woodcut and engraving novels in the hexagonal gallery
• Fables — Aesop, the Panchatantra, the Hitopadeśa, the Jātaka tales, La Fontaine, Reynard the Fox, Krylov, Orbeliani — the beast-tale and the moral
• Writing Fiction and Poetry — Aristotle's Poetics, Horace's Ars Poetica, Poe's Philosophy of Composition, Besant, Wharton, Lubbock, Bennett, Cody, Strunk's The Elements of Style
• Poetry — Hesiod, Ferdowsi, Hafez, Rumi, and the classical lyric & verse tradition
• Letters and Essays — Cicero, Seneca, Sei Shōnagon, Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes, Milton, Lamb, Hazlitt, Nietzsche, Emerson (the letter & the essay — reflective prose)
• Satire — The Satire of the Trades (anon. Egyptian), Aristophanes (The Birds, The Clouds), Lucian (A True History), Horace (Satires, Epistles & Ars Poetica), Rabelais (Gargantua and Pantagruel), Erasmus (The Praise of Folly), Thomas More (Utopia), Swift (Gulliver's Travels), Voltaire (Candide), Mark Twain (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court), Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary) — irony, vice & the mockery of folly
• Charles Dickens — The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations — the Victorian novel & social conscience
• William Shakespeare — Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Shakespeare's Sonnets, The Tempest — the Elizabethan stage & the English language
• Adventure Novels — Defoe (Robinson Crusoe), Scott (Ivanhoe), Dumas (The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo), Melville (Moby Dick), Verne (Around the World in Eighty Days), Stevenson (Treasure Island, Kidnapped), Pyle (The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood), Haggard (King Solomon's Mines), Hope (The Prisoner of Zenda), London (The Call of the Wild, White Fang), Orczy (The Scarlet Pimpernel), Conan Doyle (The Lost World), Burroughs (Tarzan of the Apes, The Land That Time Forgot), Sabatini (Scaramouche) — the romance of action & the far horizon
• Russian Literature — Pushkin (Eugene Onegin, The Queen of Spades, The Captain's Daughter, The Bronze Horseman), Lermontov (A Hero of Our Time, The Demon), Gogol (Dead Souls), Goncharov (Oblomov), Turgenev (A Nest of the Gentry, Fathers and Sons), Dostoevsky (Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov), Tolstoy (War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Resurrection, Hadji Murad), Chekhov (Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, Short Stories) — the Russian novel & the Golden Age
• Visual Art — Vitruvius (De Architectura), Cennini (Il Libro dell'Arte), Dürer, Vasari (Lives of the Painters), Leonardo (A Treatise on Painting, The Notebooks), Bellori, Burke (The Sublime and Beautiful), Diderot (Salons), Lessing (Laocoön), Goethe (Theory of Colours), Chevreul, Ruskin (Modern Painters, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Stones of Venice, The Elements of Drawing), Viollet-le-Duc, Zola (Mon Salon), Blanc, Pater (The Renaissance), Berenson, Van Gogh (Letters), Clive Bell (Art), Louis Sullivan — the literature of seeing: art, aesthetics & architecture
• Women's Literature — Christine de Pizan (The Book of the City of Ladies), Aphra Behn (Oroonoko), Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman), Austen (Pride and Prejudice), Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), the Brontës (Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights), George Eliot (Middlemarch), Dickinson (Poems), Harriet Jacobs, Ida B. Wells, Wharton (The House of Mirth), Chopin (The Awakening), Larsen (Passing), and Woolf (A Room of One's Own)
• Classic American Novels — Cooper (The Last of the Mohicans), Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter), Melville (Moby Dick), Stowe (Uncle Tom's Cabin), Twain (Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn), Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady), Crane (The Red Badge of Courage), Wharton (The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence), Cather (O Pioneers!, My Ántonia), Lewis (Main Street, Babbitt), Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby), Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms), Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying), and Steinbeck (Cup of Gold)

Level III — Wisdom: read what the ancients actually wrote about how to live and govern

Wisdom — philosophy and politics: what makes a good life and a good society. The deepest floor holds 8 galleries of philosophy, statecraft, historiography, rhetoric, the world's scriptures, the foundations of law, and the classics of strategy and the conduct of war. Reach Level III via the spiral staircase descending from any Level II hexagonal gallery, or via the dashboard tile.

• Philosophy — Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuang Zhou, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius
• Governance & Society — Aristotle's Politics, Cicero, Kautilya's Arthashastra, Machiavelli
• History — Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Sima Qian, Tacitus, Ibn Khaldun
• Rhetoric — Aristotle's Rhetoric, Cicero's De Oratore, Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, Demosthenes
• Religion & Spirituality — the Rigveda, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Dhammapada, Tao Te Ching, Qur'an, Augustine's Confessions, Rumi's Masnavi, William James
• Law — the codes of Hammurabi and Justinian, Magna Carta, Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Beccaria, Blackstone, and the American founding
• War & Military Thought — the Battle of Megiddo (Annals of Thutmose III), Sun Tzu's Art of War, Thucydides, Xenophon's Anabasis, Caesar's Gallic Wars, Arrian, Clausewitz's On War, Jomini
• Autobiography & Confession — Augustine's Confessions, Josephus, Abelard's Historia Calamitatum, Cellini, Rousseau's Confessions, Franklin, Gibbon, Frederick Douglass, Thoreau's Walden, Harriet Jacobs, Booker T. Washington, Helen Keller

Proof the map is real — three actual doors

The "connected rooms" are not a metaphor: every door between two subjects carries a written, one-line argument for why those two bodies of work belong side by side. Here are three doors exactly as they appear in the Index:

• Epics → First Plays: "Tragedy descends from epic — Aeschylus called his works 'slices from the great banquet of Homer.'"
• Philosophy → Governance & Society: "Ethics becomes politics the moment the good life is asked of a city rather than a person — Plato and Aristotle cross both hexagonal galleries."
• History → Governance & Society: "The record of how states actually behaved is the raw material of statecraft — Thucydides and Tacitus are read as manuals of power."

There are 195 such doors across the 52 galleries, each with its own justification. Three features let you use them:

• The Cortex Map lays out a whole floor as a clickable diagram — every gallery and every door visible at once, so you can see the shape of a field before entering it.
• Reading Trails let you string galleries (and individual books) into an ordered path — Euclid to Newton to Riemann, or epic to tragedy to the first novel — then share the whole trail as a single link anyone can walk.
• Connected works: the same book can shelve in more than one room (the Bhagavad Gita sits inside the Mahabharata's epic shelf and the wisdom-literature shelf), so cross-references surface wherever you happen to be standing.

Pricing — completely free, no tiers

The Babel Nexus Index costs nothing to use, in full. There is exactly one tier: free. Every gallery, every one of the 773 full texts, the AI Oracle, Reading Trails, the Cortex Map — all of it is included, for everyone, with no premium version, no locked features, no ads, no subscription, no account, and no credit card. There are no paid tiers planned: the collection is public-domain and the mission is public access. The only optional extra is a free email newsletter, if you'd like to hear when new galleries open.

The three floors at a glance

Quick answers

What is the Babel Nexus Index?

A free interactive website — a hand-curated map of 52 subjects holding 773 classic, public-domain works, laid out as connected rooms you click through instead of a search box and a flat list.

Is it free? Do I need an account?

Completely free. No sign-up, no paywall, no login, no personal data collected — just a URL you can bookmark and share.

How is it different from a search engine or Wikipedia?

A search engine hands you links; an encyclopaedia hands you summaries. The Index gives you the primary works themselves — the actual books — organised by the historical reasoning that connects them.

Can I actually read the books?

Yes. Click any title and the full text opens free via Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, or Wikisource. No download, no account.

What is the Nexus Oracle?

An AI research assistant that answers plain-language questions only from the works held in the Archive — every answer points back to real books in the collection.

More questions? Read the full FAQ.

Explore the whole site

• Home — the Index dashboard · Level I masterlist — the Sciences · Level II masterlist — Literature & Art · Level III masterlist — Wisdom
• Ask the Nexus Oracle — plain-language questions, answered from the collection
• The Archivist's Journal — essays and notes from the librarian
• The Thesis — the full written argument behind the Index's design
• How the Index works · Frequently asked questions · About the librarian

People are using it: the Index has welcomed over 3,400 visits since launching in March 2026, and the site shows live counts of readers currently present, total visits, and books opened — real numbers from the running catalog, updated as you watch.

Follow along: the Index is on X at @BabelNexus; connect with Nishan Stepak on LinkedIn or Reddit, or write to the librarian from the About page.

Lineage — the century-old dream this Index finally makes walkable

The Index is named for Borges' Library of Babel (1941), built on the architecture Bush sketched in As We May Think (1945), and aimed at the goal Wells named in World Brain (1936–38; read it at the Internet Archive): a permanent, universally accessible synthesis of human knowledge. It is the latest answer to a question that recurs every few generations — Bacon's Novum Organum, d'Alembert's preface to the Encyclopédie, Dewey's classification, Peirce's semiotics, Ted Nelson's Xanadu, Tim Berners-Lee's Web — what would it look like to make knowledge itself navigable?

Routes — jump straight to any floor or door

• / — Visual Explorer (default hexagonal gallery)
• /dashboard — Dashboard overview
• /archive — Knowledge Base: the Level I (sciences) masterlist
• /literature — the Level II (literature) masterlist
• /wisdom — the Level III (wisdom) masterlist
• /intelligence — Oracle interface
• /n/<chamber-id> — Visual Explorer focused on a specific hexagonal gallery (deep-linkable)
• /t/<encoded> — A walkable associative trail (Bush's idea, made concrete)