How it works

What this is

A visual library of 53 rooms (called hexagonal galleries) and 823 classic books — all public-domain primary works, from Euclid and Newton to Borges and Mary Shelley. Each hexagonal gallery is a subject (Astronomy, Logic, Epics, First Novels…). Each book sits on a shelf inside it. Edges connect the rooms when one subject historically led to another.

Think of it as a smart map to free public-domain literature — built in the lineage of three old ideas about knowledge, explained just below. The Public Domain Library is the free-reading section on Levels I–III; Level IV, Beyond the Public Domain, is the separate Babel Nexus Bookstore for selected Annotated Classics, Annotated Nonfiction, Illustrated Classics, and Visual Literature editions to purchase.

The three ideas it's built on

Borges — The Library of Babel (1941) — why every room is a hexagon

A short story that pictures the universe as an endless honeycomb of six-sided rooms holding every possible book. That's where the hexagonal galleries come from.

H. G. Wells — World Brain (1938) — why it's one place for everyone

Wells argued for a single, permanent encyclopaedia of human thought that anyone, anywhere could reach. That's the ambition: humanity's foundational works gathered in one navigable place.

Vannevar Bush — the Memex (1945) — why ideas are linked & trails sharable

Bush imagined a desk that linked documents together along "associative trails" — the idea that became the hyperlink. That's where the edges between rooms and the shareable Reading Trails come from.

How the collection is organized — three floors

Level I — Science (21 galleries · 250 works)

How we came to measure and explain the world — Astronomy, Mathematics, Logic, Physics, and Geography & Exploration. The ground floor.

Level II — Literature & Art (24 galleries · 491 works)

The stories we tell and how we learned to tell them — Epics, First Novels, the first plays, mysteries, and science fiction, plus author rooms like Shakespeare, Dickens, and the Russian novelists.

Level III — Wisdom (8 galleries · 112 works)

How to think and how to live — Philosophy, History, Law, Rhetoric, Religion & Spirituality, and the classics of governance and war.

Key terms, in plain words

Hexagonal gallery

A room. Each one holds a single subject — Astronomy, Epics, Philosophy. Picture a shelf you can stand inside.

Edge

A line connecting two galleries. It means one subject grew out of, or fed into, another — so you can follow the reasoning instead of just jumping around at random.

The three floors (Levels)

The collection is stacked in three tiers: Level I is science, Level II is literature, Level III is wisdom (philosophy, history, law, religion…). Staircases link the floors.

Public domain

The works are old enough that no one owns the copyright, so they are free to read forever — no paywall, no account, no sign-in.

The Nexus Oracle

An AI assistant that answers only from the books held here. It will not invent facts from the open web; every answer points back to works in the Archive.

Reading Trail

A path you build by stringing galleries together in an order that makes sense to you, then share as a single link — Bush’s "associative trail" made literal.

Two ways to start

From the Dashboard

The Domain Map on the right of the Dashboard is a grid of all 53 hexagonal galleries. Click any tile (Astronomy, Logic, Epics…) to walk straight in.

From the Visual Explorer

The signature view. Every hexagonal gallery is a hexagon orbiting the one you're in. Click an edge or a neighbouring hex to move to that room.

Three things to try inside a hexagonal gallery

1. Open a book. Click any title on the hexagonal gallery's shelf — it opens in an in-page reader pulled from Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, or Wikisource. No download, no account.
2. Ask the Nexus Oracle. The lightning bolt in the sidebar opens a Gemini-powered Q&A grounded only in the Archive. Ask things like "trace Euclid to Riemann" or "what does the Archive say about memory?"
3. Build a Reading Trail. The bottom-left tray lets you stitch hexagonal galleries into an ordered path, name it, and share it as a single URL — Bush’s "associative trail" made literal.

Finding your way around

Search

The search box in the sidebar finds any gallery or any book by title, author, or year and jumps you straight to it.

Back & Home

The controls at the bottom-left retrace your steps or return you to the Dashboard — the Index remembers the whole path you took, not just the last room.

Bookmarks

Save any gallery to return to later. Bookmarks live in your own browser; nothing is sent anywhere.

The Master Booklists

Prefer a plain list? Each floor has a complete one — Science at /archive, literature at /literature, and wisdom at /wisdom — every held work in a single scrollable index.

Full screen & shortcuts

The Visual Explorer has a full-screen button for a distraction-free view, plus a keyboard-shortcuts panel for moving faster.

Why this looks different from a normal library

• No catalogue, no Dewey numbers. Books are clustered by subject and threaded by the reasoning that links one work to another.
• Everything is free, forever. Only public-domain primary texts (or Wikisource/Wikipedia stand-ins where the work itself is held but the page references a citation).
• No accounts. No login and no personal data to read the Index — only anonymous, aggregate analytics. Google Analytics sets first-party analytics cookies only with consent; Microsoft Clarity remains cookieless; Grademypage uses no cookies. Mixpanel loads only with analytics consent and records anonymous book-opening and source-link events only. Withdrawing stops Mixpanel and clears its local identifier. No Mixpanel session replay, autocapture, profiles, emails, or query text — and never ad or cross-site cookies. Just a URL you can bookmark, share, or refresh into the same place.

Wondering how this stacks up against Project Gutenberg, Open Library, or Standard Ebooks? See the full side-by-side comparison.