A new Guinness record has been broken at Simon Fraser University’s Nano Imaging Lab – the world’s smallest published book! It even has it’s own International Standard Book Number (ISBN-978 -1-894897-17-4)!! How small? Well, a head of a pin is about 2 mm. At 0.07 mm x 0.10 mm, “Teeny Ted from Turnip Town” is a tinier read than the two smallest books cited by the Guinness Book of World Records: the New Testament of the King James Bible (5 x 5 mm, produced by MIT in 2001) and Chekhov’s Chameleon (0.9 x 0.9 mm, Palkovic, 2002).
What’s the catch? Well, you’re going to need a scanning electron microscope to read it!
Publisher Robert Chaplin, with the help of SFU scientists Li Yang and Karen Kavanagh, produced a nanoscale book made up of 30 silicon microtablets. The story, written by Malcolm Douglas Chaplin, is a fable about Teeny Ted’s victory in the turnip contest at the annual county fair. These scientists used electron microscopes and a focused-gallium-ion beam of only seven nanometers in diameter to carve the space surrounding each letter of the book. Since this book is considered an intricate work of contemporary art, the book is available in a signature edition (100 copies) from the publisher, through the SFU lab.