Teeny Ted from Turnip Town (2007), published by Robert Chaplin, is certified by Guinness World Records as the world's smallest reproduction of a printed book.^[1] 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.^[2]

The book's size is 0.07 mm x 0.10 mm. 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 (this was compared to the head of a pin at 2 mm, 2,000,000 nm, across). The book has its own ISBN, 978-1-894897-17-4.^[2]

The story was written by Malcolm Douglas Chaplin and is "a fable about Teeny Ted's victory in the turnip contest at the annual county fair."^[2]

The book has been published in a limited edition of 100 copies by the laboratory and requires a scanning electron microscope to read the text.

In December 2012, a Library Edition of the book was published with a full title of Teeny Ted from Turnip Town & the Tale of Scale: A Scientific Book of Word Puzzles and an ISBN 978-1-894897-36-5. On the title page it is referred to as the "Large Print Edition of the World's Smallest Book". The book was published using funds from a successful Kickstarter campaign with contributors' names shown on the dust jacket.^[3]

See also

• Nanotechnology
• Limited edition books
• List of nanotechnology applications
• A Boy and His Atom, a stop-motion film created in a microscopic (molecular) scale

References

External links

• "Tale of Teeny Ted said to be world's smallest book". Reuters. April 11, 2007.