Originally published at: This tiny 5 millimeter book just sold for $4,000 | Boing Boing
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I wish they included pictures of the text itself, and not just the print blocks. Still, impressive!
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I’ve got the ebook version…
I’m not a connoisseur of micro books, so I expected the cover to look a bit nicer given how fine the grain of rice artwork I’ve seen can be. I guess the leather doesn’t take as good an impression as the paper inside.
Binding the book seems like the biggest challenge to me since I assume that has to be done by hand.
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Only four grand for an actual (ACTUAL) Gutenburg Bible? Some people don’t know how lucky they are, man, back in the US, back in the US, back in the USSR.
That font is about 0.4 point, for those of you doing the math at home.
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I’m gonna have to get a smaller pica ruler… 
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One point is 0.353mm. This font appears to be about 0.14mm high.
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I’m still waiting for the mini-Gutenburg of the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear.
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My grandfather was a printer and loved miniature books. I particularly treasure the mini Gettysburg Address he printed – maybe 1.5" x 1" on about 8 pages. Guessing it was 4pt type.
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Consider this my tourism plug, but if you love miniature books, you really need to visit the Cleveland Public Library’s Special Collections department.
While you’re there the cabinets alternate with materials from the largest print collection of chess in the world.
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Not quite. The actual Gutenberg Bible (or “42-line Bible”, because it is typeset such that there are two columns of 42 lines of type on each page) is 1,288 pages that are approximately 40 by 29 centimetres in size, and is usually bound in two volumes. IOW, one ginormous humdinger of a book. 21 complete copies still exist, and if they’re sold, which rarely happens, they go for millions and millions of dollars.
The tiny book here only contains the Lord’s Prayer, which is a minuscule fragment of the text of the Bible. I’m at a loss why anybody would pay $4,000 for the thing because you can apparently still order it new from the Gutenberg Museum online shop for €32 plus shipping. Perhaps it’s the fancy packaging that makes the difference – I live in Mainz so could probably pop down to the museum to check out what the copies they’re selling actually look like. They do point out on their web site that they can’t make any more of them for that price, so get one while stocks last.
In any case there must be a whole bunch of these books around if they’ve been selling them for 70 years; I’m pretty sure that my dad used to own a copy but haven’t seen it around recently.
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How much for “an NFT of” this tiny 5 mm book?
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