Borges is often praised for his books within books, worlds within worlds, but he was well aware that what he laid down was no more than a bridge between, or even as little as a telescope through which to glimpse a passing ship. Most novels are a world within a world anyway, the outer being our physical one. Such literalisation bore Borges' distaste for the novel, this almost gratuitous insistence on painting every corner of its existence for you. I think especially of his praise for Joyce as one of the great writers and Ulysses as one of the form's great achievements, with the gleeful admission that he never finished the book, "I (like the rest of the universe) have not read Ulysses, but I read and happily reread certain scenes." The great pleasure of reading, for Borges, and I have no doubt he'd agree with me that he was a reader first and foremost, is the world we see for ourselves within the cracks. "A dark horse riderless, bolts like a phantom past the winningpost, his name moon-foaming, his eyeballs stars." The invisible page behind the page, the words we imagine between the spines of a book we may only ever open for a moment or two. It is a world onto itself, liberated from detail, one we see from whatever angle we choose. For Borges, stories are best told in the margins, as asides, as inferences, as encyclopedias of imagined planets, of murder plots and societies and dreams that are only dreams. The book should pass by instantly, all the better for the imagination to expand and contract, for the documents to live and breathe forever. And, true to his word, they do.

This, The Library of Babel, named for and containing that most famous and encapsulating of stories, is not a vital collection. It's one of those cheapy 'Penguin wants a product by every famous author exclusive to them' hardcovers, no bigger than a reluctantly splayed-out hand and containing a random assortment of two or three stories from each of his most famous collections. This means a total lack of cohesion and thematic balance; reading front-to-back a story as rich and affecting as The Book of Sand seems almost a retread, though then Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote feels all the more sly and witty. But it was the first I owned and remains the one I reach for most often. Rotating alongside my pocketbooks of Keats and Shelley, every once in a while, much more frequently in the crystalline-green dew of early spring, he'll accompany me for a walk and sit alongside me on a park bench. We talk, and as I depart, and he waves me goodbye, and I wade home through the moisture-laden air, my imagination rapidly expanding and contracting as that distant ship takes on yet another heretofore unseen feature, I am at once lighter and heavier. Such is the magic of Borges.