The world’s smallest book, “Teeny Ted from Turnip Town”, is 100×70 micrometers in size and requires a scanning electron microscope to read, as light beams are too large.
The Book You'll Never Read Without a $100,000 Microscope
Forget squinting at fine print. The world's smallest book is so microscopically tiny that ordinary light is physically too large to read it. "Teeny Ted from Turnip Town" measures just 70×100 micrometers—about the width of a human hair—and requires a scanning electron microscope to view its pages.
Created in 2007 by Vancouver artist Robert Chaplin, this Guinness World Record holder isn't just small; it's a feat of nanotechnology that costs more to read than most people's cars.
How Do You Even Make a Book That Small?
Chaplin didn't use a really tiny typewriter. The book was created at Simon Fraser University using a focused ion beam—essentially a precision instrument that carves features measured in nanometers onto a silicon chip. Each letter was burned into the crystalline silicon surface with line resolutions of 42 nanometers.
The entire illustrated story exists on a microchip smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. It even has its own ISBN: 978-1-894897-17-4, making it an officially published work despite being invisible to the naked eye.
Why Light Can't Read It
Here's where physics gets in the way of your reading plans. Visible light wavelengths range from about 400 to 700 nanometers—significantly larger than the text carved into Teeny Ted. When light waves encounter objects smaller than their wavelength, they can't resolve the details. It's like trying to feel the texture of sandpaper while wearing oven mitts.
A scanning electron microscope doesn't use light at all. Instead, it fires a focused beam of electrons at the surface, which have wavelengths thousands of times smaller than visible light. This allows scientists to image features down to the nanometer scale—small enough to read 70-micrometer books.
The Reading Experience
Want to read Teeny Ted? You'll need:
- Access to a scanning electron microscope (typically $100,000-$1,000,000)
- A vacuum chamber (SEMs don't work in regular air)
- Training to operate complex scientific equipment
- The actual microchip, of which very few copies exist
The story itself is reportedly a children's tale about Ted, a character from Turnip Town. Given the extraordinary effort required to read it, we'll assume it's worth it.
Still the Champion
Nearly two decades after its creation, Teeny Ted still holds the Guinness World Record as the world's smallest reproduction of a printed book. While various nano-writing experiments have created smaller text, Teeny Ted remains the smallest complete, published book with an ISBN.
The record stands as a reminder that sometimes the biggest achievements come in the smallest packages—even if you need a six-figure microscope to appreciate them.