Babel Nexus Index — Explore Public Domain Classics

Explore classic books and big ideas in a whole new way: 842 public-domain works mapped across 53 connected galleries, with an AI Oracle as your guide.

Explore classic books and big ideas in a whole new way — a discovery system for the public domain. A three-floor knowledge graph: 21 science hexagonal galleries on Level I, 24 literature hexagonal galleries on Level II, and 8 wisdom hexagonal galleries on Level III — 53 hexagonal galleries holding 844 gallery placements representing 814 unique label-and-year works (books, papers, and reports), plus an AI Oracle (powered by Google Gemini) that answers free-form questions about the Archive. Built in the lineage of Jorge Luis Borges' Library of Babel, Vannevar Bush's Memex, and H. G. Wells' World Brain.

The Index is a knowledge-graph explorer at https://babelnexus.com, built for students tracing an idea back to its source, researchers mapping how disciplines connect, writers hunting for material, and curious readers — every full text is free to read. Each hexagonal gallery is a thematic shelf; hexagonal galleries are connected by typed edges that descend directly from Bush's "associative trails" idea in As We May Think (1945). At the exact center of every hexagonal gallery is a spiral staircase to the next floor — Borges' hexagonal-gallery architecture, made navigable. Visitors can walk the graph, ask the Oracle natural-language questions, build and share their own associative trails, and view every primary source's full text via Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive, or Wikipedia.

Level IV is a separate storefront, not a fourth free archive floor. Its eight hexagons are Annotated Classics (13 ebook editions), Annotated Nonfiction (8 ebook editions), Illustrated Classics (15 ebook editions), Visual Literature (7 ebook editions), Wordless Books / Visual Narratives (7 ebook editions), Modern Horror Novels (20 ebook records), Modern Ceramics (17 ebook records), and Modern Horror — Illustrated and Graphic Novels (14 ebook records), for 101 editions total. Modern Horror Novels is arranged in four chronological walls: 1954–1976, 1977–1987, 1987–2006, and 2007–2023. Modern Ceramics is arranged in four walls of 5/4/4/4 works: Form, Handbuilding & Construction; Wheel, Vessel & Experimental Form; Surface, Glaze, Decoration & Repair; and Ceramic Artists & Pottery Traditions. Modern Horror — Illustrated and Graphic Novels is arranged in four walls of 4/3/1/6 ebook works: Masters of Illustrated Horror; Body, Psychological & Experimental Horror; International & Experimental / Unconventional Horror; and Gothic, Historical & Hybrid Horror. Annotated Classics and Annotated Nonfiction preserve editorial and scholarly annotation, including publisher, format, classification, contributor, and description details where recorded; Illustrated Classics uses pictures to accompany a primarily textual work; Visual Literature covers comics, manga, graphic adaptations, and woodcut or wordless novels in which images are essential to the narrative; Wordless Books / Visual Narratives focuses on contemporary image-led stories, visual journeys, and picture books. Some historical illustrations may themselves be public domain, so the Index does not claim that every illustration or edition is copyrighted. Only verified Bookshop.org purchases are linked, while exact editions still being checked are marked unavailable. Floors I–III remain free of purchase and affiliate links.

Author: Nishan Stepak (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nishanstepak/, nishanbstepak@babelnexus.com). Operated by Babel Nexus, LLC, a limited liability company registered in New York.

Source: Babel Nexus Index (https://babelnexus.com/)