Teeny Ted from Turnip Town

Teeny Ted from Turnip Town (2007) is a book produced in the Nano Imaging Laboratory at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and as of April 2007 was the smallest published book in the world^[1].

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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 across.

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."

The book has been described as "an intricate work of contemporary art" that will be published in a limited edition of 100 copies by the laboratory, and will require a scanning electron microscope to read the text.

The book's International Standard Book Number is ISBN-978-1-894897-17-4.

Author: Malcolm Douglas Chaplin
Publisher: Robert Chaplin
Production assistants: Li Yang and Karen Kavanagh (SFU scientists)

Record status

At the time of publication, the Guinness Book of World Records listed the New Testament of the King James Bible (5 mm x 5 mm, produced by MIT in 2001) and Anton Chekhov's Chameleon (0.9 mm x 0.9 mm, Palkovic, 2002) as the smallest books.