Teeny Ted from Turnip Town is officially the world’s tiniest reproduction of a printed book.

Produced in SFU’s Nano Imaging Lab in 2007—and measuring a mere 0.07 mm by 0.1 mm—the book has been recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records.

With help from lab manager Li Yang and professor Karen Kavanagh, BC artist and publisher Robert Chaplin made the book using a focused beam of gallium ions to etch 30 micro-tablets into single-crystalline silicon.

The focused gallium-ion beam was about seven nanometers (nm)—seven-billionths of a metre—in diameter so each letter consisted of 40-nm wide lines.

“Each letter takes a few seconds, so a whole book adds up in time to something probably not useful yet for commercial production,” says Kavanagh.

“We need more beams moving in parallel—which is not impossible. Once scribed into silicon the book will last for a million years or more.”

Reading Teeny Ted from Turnip Town requires a scanning electron microscope.

The book is a tinier read than the two smallest books formerly cited by Guinness: 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). The head of a pin is about 2 mm.

Valued at around $15,000, Teeny Ted is stored in a tiny box in a bank vault, but a framed copy of the Guinness world-record certificate hangs on the SFU lab’s wall.

Chaplin now has plans to make hardcopy versions of the nano book—a fable written by his brother Malcolm Douglas Chaplin about Teeny Ted’s victory in the turnip contest at the annual county fair.

He is currently seeking investors via www.kickstarter.com.