The world’s smallest reproduction of a printed book, as certified by Guinness World Records, is “Teeny Ted from Turnip Town” published by Robert Chaplin in 2007. The book was produced in the Nano Imaging Laboratory at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, with the assistance of SFU scientists Li Yang and Karen Kavanagh. The book’s size is 0.07 mm x 0.10 mm, and the letters are carved into 30 microtablets on a polished piece of single crystalline silicon using a focused-gallium-ion beam with a minimum diameter of 7 nanometers. The story was written by Malcolm Douglas Chaplin[1][2][7].
However, there have been claims of even smaller books. For instance, a Siberian man named Vladimir M. Aniskin created a micro-book with pages measuring 0.07 by 0.09 millimeters, which is marginally smaller than “Teeny Ted from Turnip Town”[8]. Another claim comes from Toppan Printing Co. of Japan, which announced the creation of a tiny book measuring 0.75 by 0.75 mm[4]. However, these claims have not been officially recognized by Guinness World Records.
Japan has created what it is claiming is the smallest ever printed book, with pages measuring 0.75 millimetres (0.03 inches) which are impossible to read with the naked eye. The 22-page micro-book, entitled Shiki no Kusabana (flowers of seasons), contains names and monochrome illustrations of Japanese flowers such as the cherry and the plum. Toppan Printing, who have been making micro books since 1964, said letters just 0.01 mm wide were created using the same technology as money printers use to prevent forgery. The book is on display at Toppan’s Printing Museum in Tokyo, and is on sale, together with a magnifying glass and a larger copy, for 29,400 yen (£205). Toppan said it would be applying to Guinness World Records to claim the title of world’s smallest book, presently held by a 0.9 mm, 30-page Russian volume called Chameleon, created by Siberian craftsman Anatoliy Konenko in 1996. [9]
What would happen if we found something like this trapped in a billion year old glob of amber?
Citations:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teeny_Ted_from_Turnip_Town
[2] https://www.industrytap.com/guinness-world-record-smallest-book-world-requires-microscope-order-read/23332
[3] https://bookriot.com/the-smallest-book-in-the-world-and-other-really-little-books/
[4] https://www.finebooksmagazine.com/blog/worlds-tiniest-book
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihA9a4gQLhY
[6] https://www.amazon.com/Smallest-Book-World-Josua-Reichert/dp/3931126420
[7] https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/smallest-reproduction-of-a-printed-book
[8] https://abcnews.go.com/International/siberian-man-claims-created-worlds-smallest-book/story?id=37306465
[9] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/9927200/Is-this-the-worlds-smallest-book.html
