each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format;
each book is of four hundred and ten pages;
each page, of forty lines,
each line, of some eighty letters which are black in color.
There are also letters on the spine of each book; these letters do not indicate or prefigure what the pages will say. I know that this incoherence at one time seemed mysterious.
Before summarizing the solution (whose discovery, in spite of its tragic projections, is perhaps the capital fact in history) I wish to recall a few axioms.