Creator of "world's smallest book" raising funds for a large print edition

Robert Chaplin is a writer and artist, and he holds the world's record for producing the world's smallest book (he etched a copy of "Teeny Ted From Turnip Town" into the surface of a microchip using a focused ion beam and scanning electron microscope). Now he's raising money on Kickstarter to produce a "large print" edition that will be legible to readers who don't have access to scanning electron microscopes of their own.

Teeny Ted a wild rhyme by Malcolm Douglas Chaplin. It tells the tale of Teeny Ted and his triumph at the turnip contest at the annual county fair. The typography of the tablets looks like ancient cuneiform because I used the ion beam to carve the space surrounding each letter. Here are some sample tablets carved with a line resolution of 42 nanometers. A nanometer is one millionth of a millimeter.

One lucky $10,000 backer will get to own the original, record-breaking book-on-the-surface-of-a-chip.

The World's Smallest Book - a large print edition (Thanks, John!)

• [nixiebunny]

  One more good reason to get a scanning electron microscope.  As if there aren’t enough good reasons already.

• [dan p]

  I made a wedding gift for a couple a friends years ago using one of these tools. Milled a poem in a grain of sand and put that grain in a jar of sand. There was a handy picture of the specific grain if they were interested in locating it. Fun tools to play with. (it is the ion part that does the milling). Too bad no access anymore.

• [Ben Burger]

  Regardless of size, that font is illegible.

  • [Paul Renault]

    Oh, just to be pendantic: If it’s ‘regardless of size’, it’s a typeface, not a font.

• [Gabriel McCann]

  It’s legible to me Teeny Ted from Turnip town was standing in the street singing his favorite turnip tune and tapping with his feet