According to a release from Simon Fraser University, researchers at SFU’s Nano Imaging Lab have produced the world’s smallest book:

The only catch — you’ll need a scanning electron microscope to read it.

At 0.07 mm X 0.10 mm, Teeny Ted from Turnip Town is a tinier read than the two smallest books currently cited by the Guinness Book of World Records: the New Testament of the King James Bible (5 X 5 mm, produced by MIT in 2001) and Chekhov’s Chameleon (0.9 X 0.9 mm, Palkovic, 2002).

(By way of comparison, the head of a pin is about 2 mm).

The production of the nanoscale book was carried out at SFU by publisher Robert Chaplin, with the help of SFU scientists Li Yang and Karen Kavanagh. The work involved using a focused-gallium-ion beam and one of a number of electron microscopes available in SFU’s nano imaging facility.

With a minimum diameter of seven nanometers (a nanometer is about 10 atoms in size) the beam was programmed to carve the space surrounding each letter of the book.

Not to belittle the accomplishment, but it has occurred to Quillblog that Teeny Ted, written by Chaplin’s brother, is probably somewhat shorter than the King James Bible, and maybe even than Chekhov’s story.

That quibble aside, the other pressing issue, considering that 100 copies of a signature edition are available from the publisher, is this: once you buy it, where do you keep it so that you can find it to read at bedtime?