Longest single-volume book in the world goes on sale - and is impossible to read

[sl8]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/sep/20/longest-single-volume-book-in-the-world-goes-on-sale-and-is-impossible-to-read

Longest single-volume book in the world goes on sale – and is impossible to read



The 21,450-page volume of manga series One Piece is physically unreadable, to highlight how comics now exist as commodities

David Barnett
Tue 20 Sep 2022 07.33 EDT

A limited edition single volume of the long-running manga One Piece is being billed as the longest book in existence.

At 21,450 pages, it is physically impossible to read, making it less of a book and more of a sculpture.

Priced at €1,900 (£1,640), the book isn’t credited to Eiichiro Oda, the writer and artist behind One Piece, which has been serialised in Japanese magazine Shōnen Jump every week since 1997. It is being sold instead as the work of Ilan Manouach, the multidisciplinary artist who has designed the limited edition volume, which is titled ONEPIECE.

Manouach printed out the Japanese digital edition of One Piece and bound it together, treating the comic not as a book but as “sculptural material”, according to the book/ artwork’s French publisher JBE.

A spokesperson for JBE told the Guardian that ONEPIECE is an “unreadable sculpture that takes the shape of a book – the largest one to date in page numbers and spine width – that materialises the ecosystem of online dissemination of comics.” Whatever it is classed as, there certainly seems to be a market for ONEPIECE – the limited edition run of 50 copies sold out within days of its release on 7 September.

[...]

[Ferrets are Cool]

1. One Piece is magnificient...

the anime, not this crap.

[cyclonefence]

2. But why is it "unreadable"

if it is a book, whether it's intended to be sculpture or not? If it's not readable (and I assume they mean physically unreadable, not unreadable because it's such a dreadful piece of writing), is it really a book?

I'm old, and I don't get it. Although I did watch "Food Wars"--that's anime, right?-- on Adult Swim.

[malthaussen]

3. With that many pages, you'd only be able to get a few at either end to lie flat to read...

... go very far into the volume, and there won't be any way to open the pages to read.

-- Mal

[IcyPeas]

4. yeah, I don't think the pages can be seen..... photos