I thought this story that ran this morning on the AP wire might be of interest to Exlibris members. --ECW
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Bhutan Tome Named World's Largest Book
133-Pound Book Uses Enough Paper to Cover Football Field
By JUSTIN POPE, AP
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (Dec. 15) - A 133-pound tome about the Asian country of
Bhutan that uses enough paper to cover a football field and a gallon of ink
has been declared the world's largest published book.
Author Michael Hawley, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, said it's not a book to curl up with at bedtime - "unless you
plan to sleep on it."
Each copy of "Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Kingdom," is 5-by-7 feet,
112 pages and costs about $2,000 to produce. Hawley is charging $10,000 to
be donated to a charity he founded, Friendly Planet, which has built schools
in Cambodia and Bhutan.
Guinness World Records has certified Hawley's work as the biggest published
book, according to Stuart Claxton, a Guinness researcher.
Hawley has led a number of MIT student expeditions to Cambodia and Bhutan,
an isolated country of 700,000 people that is about the size of Switzerland,
and thought he could raise money for education there by putting together
some of the thousands of photographs he was gathering.
He said he did not set out to make the world's largest book. But playing
around in his office at MIT's Media Lab with a state-of-the art digital
printer, Hawley discovered just how spectacular large, digital images can
look - especially of Bhutan, a country flush with colorful scenery and dress
where even the rice is red.
"What I really wanted was a 5-by-7-foot chunk of wall that would let me
change the picture every day," he said. "And I thought there was an
old-fashioned mechanism that might work. It's called the book."
Hawley said he's received about two dozen orders for the book, which
includes an easel-like stand. Early customers include Brewster Kahle, the
inventor of the Internet Archive project, who has known Hawley for years
through his computer science work at MIT.
"You deal with a book in a fundamentally new way," Kahle said when asked
about the appeal, adding he wasn't certain how he would display his copy.
"You meet it eye-to-eye, like a person."
Processing and printing the images took enormous chunks of computing power,
much of it donated by companies including Dell, Apple Computers and Kodak.
Then there was the assembly. At this size, the normal physics of bookbinding
simply don't apply.
"All my traditional techniques for binding books are impossible," said ACME
Bookbinding President Paul Parisi. Zeff Hanower, a shop machinist, had to
build an assembly line from scratch. ACME also used an "accordion" style of
binding to ensure the book folded and held together properly.
Hawley said his research revealed that the biggest book in the Library of
Congress was John J. Audubon's 19th century "Birds of America," which is 2
1/2-by-3 1/2 feet.
12/15/03 06:35 EST
Copyright 2003 The Associated Press.