Mark Palkovic, head of the Albino Gorno Memorial (CCM) Music Library, returned from the 31st Grand Conclave in Vancouver of the Miniature Book Society with a special souvenir — his own copy of the new world’s smallest book.
Measuring just 0.75 x 0.75 mm, the book, titled Flowers of the Four Seasons, was published in December 2012 by the Toppan Printing Co., Ltd. It contains 22 pages with sections for each of the four seasons.
According to the publisher:
“This microbook, Flowers of the four seasons, was created by employing the ultrafine prepress and printing techniques for securities and electronics products developed by Toppan Printing Co., Ltd.
The book is extremely small with a height and width of 0.75 millimeters and 22 pages. It presents twelve flowers found during the four seasons in Japan with sections for each of spring, summer, autumn and winter, and the pages feature pictures of flowers together with the corresponding names. There are four types of characters used in this book. These are Japanese hiragana and katakana characters, Chinese characters, and Roman characters. On four of the book’s pages, extremely small hidden text is printed within the picture. The width of the lines of this text is just 10 microns (one micron is one-thousandth of a millimeter). This is probably the smallest text that has been printed.”
Flowers of the Four Seasons will join Mark’s personal collection of miniature books, which he estimates to be approximately 900. He also has the previous world’s smallest book, Chameleon by the Russian author Anton Chekhov.
