An Exhibition of Superlative Books: The Smallest Book in the World

 
Every day we open a book attached to an email. We watch the pages unfold on our glass screen, scroll down into something approaching eternity, never asking for its dimensions or pondering if it is the smallest book in the world. We download an ebook, to a device where one size fits all. Our pudgy digits tap, flick and sweep the flatly digital display, impressing us occasionally with the idea that small is beautiful. The Penguin paperback was invented to go in our handbag or coat pocket: they’re blockbusters compared with the chip in our phone. The complex history of ebooks can be explained in terms of our desire for portability, compactness, and swift access to large amounts of information. In these respects, the ebook is the latest chapter in a long history of wanting the book in our hand, in a size that can go anywhere. Google and Guinness agree that the world's smallest reproduction of a printed book is ‘Teeny Ted from Turnip Town’. It was produced by a university imaging laboratory in Vancouver in 2007. It is 0.07 mm x 0.10 mm, the letters carved into 30 microtablets on a polished piece of single crystalline silicon, using a focused-gallium-ion beam with a minimum diameter of 7nanometers. Unquote. Theologians will be interested to note that this has been compared to the head of a pin, at 2 mm across. But then, we are talking contemporary technology here. Some people still believe a book is made out of paper. The smallest physical book in the Carmelite Library is a portable King James Bible (pictured), published in Glasgow in 1901. Its metal case has a magnifying glass inserted. By holding the glass three inches from our eyeball we can read the text four inches distant, albeit darkly. The Bible would have been ideal for our world trip, back in the days when we went on world trips. This is not, of course, the smallest physical book in the world. Google again. It says the smallest physical imprint is a 26-page book on Japanese flowers, the pages just 0.75 mm in size. ‘Shiki no Kusabana, Flowers of the Seasons’ (pictured) was published in 2016 by Toppan, one of Japan’s largest printers, which has been printing micro-books since the 1960s. Theologians will note that this book has been compared in size to the eye of a needle. The book was printed using the same technology used to print banknotes and has a retail price of 29,400 yen. That’s about $360 Australian, or about $385 New Zealand. It is unclear from our sources just how many copies of ‘Shiki no Kusabana’ have been produced, or if purchase means having to travel to Toppan’s display museum in Tokyo. It could be like looking for a needle in a haystack.