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

Guinness thinks ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ is the longest novel in the world, though Marcel Proust should talk to my daughter. Bridie is a devotee of Japanese manga and is currently working her way through ‘One Piece’, an action adventure picture saga with 99 collected tankoben, i.e. individual volumes, and counting (pictured). The author, Eiichiro Oda, and his artists seem to produce new instalments at a Dickensian speed, faster than their readers can keep up. The very same Guinness says ‘One Piece’ has "the most copies published for the same comic book series by a single author. As of February 2021, the manga had over 480 million copies in circulation in 43 countries worldwide, making it the best-selling manga series in history.” Proust would have things to say about Guinness, given that Wikipedia says the longest novel is ‘Venmurasu’ by the contemporary Tamil writer Jeyamohan, a renarration of the Indian classic, the Mahabharata. We should not be surprised by versions of the Mahabharata that are longer than the Mahabharata, when we consider Thomas Mann’s ‘Joseph and His Brothers’, a retelling of the Genesis story that, at 1200 pages, goes considerably longer than the original. Proust is eighth on the Wikipedia list, Mann’s novel tenth. There are road novels where we wish the satnav guided the author’s car into a lake. The quest for the longest book, as distinct from novel, can meet all sorts of ludicrous dead ends. We wonder if some titles of longest books don’t also bob up on lists of Most Unread Book. If we treat the title of a set as one book (see Proust), are some encyclopedias the longest in the world? Given the storage capacity of computers, there are writers now generating the longest book not as some creative trial but as a pastime. When we read of the lost works of ancient authors, we can only guess at the scale of the absence; just as it’s impossible to imagine a world in which Shakespeare’s works were accidentally lost. No point blaming a librarian for that! Wikipedia states, modestly, that Wikipedia is the longest encyclopedia, but to be fair does own up to the Yongle Dadian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yongle_Encyclopedia In our long search for the longest our minds wander rather than wonder after a while. What, for example, is the longest unfolding book? The British artist David Hockney has been painting Normandy landscapes during the pandemic (pictured), inspired by the longest tapestry in the world (almost) at Bayeux. His folding French panorama could extend into the next province and still not be the longest unfolding book in the world. That claim probably goes to an unidentified orihon. Originating in the Tang Dynasty in China, the concept of writing on a roll then folding the pages to read at ease travelled to Japan where, in the form of the unfolding book, the books became known as orihon. The thought of orihons on horizons, zigzagging into space like moon-shot streamers, is attractive. We may never know the end of it, or necessarily want to.

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. 

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

Last year’s library conference included a 12-day global tour of famous and not so famous libraries, all at the safe distance of our screens. This year I’ve decided to put on an Exhibition of Superlative Books. Over the next twelve weekdays the Superlatives will flow on the ANZTLA e-list, but also here on FB. I hope you enjoy the posts. Here is the Exhibition Guide for the space called Largest. Text by Philip Harvey.

 One of the largest books in the Carmelite Library is ‘The Red Book’ of Carl Jung (height 40 cm), which he called ‘Liber Novus’. It was published posthumously in 2009, a private collection of psychological experiments from 1913 to 1916 that were instrumental in the foundation of Jung’s theories. The Library also holds a reader’s edition translation in handbook size, devised to assist study of the larger volume. Days may be spent enjoying its calligraphy and hand-painted images, going deeper into the unconscious. Carl Jung would have had theories about the psychology of bigness involved in producing the largest book in the world. Why, not how, is a question we ask when looking at Exhibit 2, a colossal double elephant folio of Hungarian flower illustrations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A06biAs4p9M Or there is the largest book of poems in the world (pictured), made by the Puerto Rican Rafael Morales Rodriguez, which crushes the very concept of the slim volume of verse. Morales boasts that in its 4498 pages the word ‘love’ appears 7027 times and the word ‘heart’ 5238 times. How we are meant to read the book, or create the intimate space associated with reading poetry, is not explained. Guinness says the largest book is a 2012 compilation of stories on the Prophet Muhammad created in Dubai and measuring an impressive if unmanageable 5 m x 8.06 m and weighing approximately 1500 kg. (pictured) The Carmelite Library does not have the doorway that could give access to this book. Indeed, there are books that require the room, or even the entire building, to be custom designed to house them. For some people though, it depends what we mean by a book. One of the largest integrated set of texts is incised in stone and rests in a religious compound in Mandalay in Myanmar. Housing this book was part of the book’s actual manufacturing plan. It is a stunning production, though some would argue that is not a book, that’s a pagoda: https://asuitcasefullofbooks.com/kuthodaw-pagoda-the-biggest-book-in-the-world-vlog/ Indeed, once we start expanding the definition of the word ‘book’ itself, who knows where it might all end? The largest book could be the building that houses the computers that record the input of the millions of diarists who freely contribute to Facebook. This is somewhat incomprehensible to the imagination. The four petabytes of data generated each day on Facebook is stored in what is known as the Hive. Online is coy about the geographic location of Hive, but it is available to us on our gadgets and we can read it every day. Those with a metaphorical turn of mind might say the largest book is the universe itself, that which all books strive to explain in larger or smaller measure, continually in a state of creation, there for us to interpret. The loan time is a lifetime and access is free.