Bleeding Fiction

I've often said, paraphrasing a bit from Neil Gaiman that the best, most worthwhile books are big enough to stun a burglar. Most often I've used this in reference to my copy of the Yale Shakespeare: The Complete Works, which Vitaly got for me for my eighteenth birthday. At twelve inches tall, nine inches wide, three inches deep and easily seven pounds, its hard to say which is more impressive, the incredible language or the sheer mass of the volume. Clock a burglar upside the head with this baby (or just read him a choice passage) and he'll be floored.

I have an old dictionary, a Webster's Unabridged from nineteen eighty three, that stands eleven inches high, eight inches wide and four and a half inches deep. It weights about five pounds, an alphabetical volume of words that could deafen the toughest ear, if it came from the right angle and with a hard enough swing.

Today, however, I found a book that puts them both to shame, a book that speaks even more strongly to my desire to hit people over the head, a book called Bhutan. Counting in at a feeble one hundred and twelve pages (as compared to over thirteen hundred for the Shakespeare), the book is nevertheless five feet tall, a little over three and a half feet (yes, feet) wide and six inches deep when closed and weighs one hundred and thirty three pounds. I am talking about a book that weights nearly as much as I do.

The contents of the book - fourty thousand pictures on two thousand square feet of print space - are impressive enough in themselves, representing the results of four expeditions to Bhutan and stunning photographs of a rich and ancient culture and a beautiful landscape, but at the moment I'm more floored by the sheer magnitude of the volume itself. This book broke the very limits of book making. MIT had to invent new technology to provide for detailed image capture on a scale as printed in this book, the digital archive of the photos contained therein is two and a half terrabytes. Only five hundred copies of this book will ever be made, each copy is made by hand when ordered and the book carries a price tag of ten thousand dollars. Buy this book and the people at Guinness will send you a certificate for being the owner of a world record holder.

I can think of few finer things to devote such effort to and I sleep assured that the five hundred lucky people who own this book can stun some very large burglars indeed.