Books - big and small

by S. Pathiravitana

"To the naked eye, it looks like a fleck of tile decorated with the Greek letters alpha and omega. But when it is magnified by a factor of 600, its true nature becomes evident - the world's most portable copy of the New Testament. According to the latest version of Guinness Book of World Records, the five-millimeter-square tablet is the smallest."

Official announcement

This is the official announcement of how they have arrived at making the smallest book in the world. You must have heard of thumb-sized Bibles that appeared a century or two after Gutenberg discovered printing. That was only a preliminary, a sort of printers flexing their fingers with the possibilities of this new art.

But today they have gone several steps further and are even thinking of having the Baghavat Gita on a grain of rice, but that being too simple a project they want to put on it instead the new and old Testaments together. That's with the help, they say, of the microchip.

I have stumbled into these heroics of miniaturising in my search for the largest book. Not because I wish to own one, but to get away from books of great size.

I noticed the other day that there was a book in my library by the name of Twentieth Century Impressions, unnoticed by me for some time. I nearly broke my back pulling it out of its place. It was so heavy that not even both my hands seem to be enough to retrieve it. And when I finally did I couldn't flip over its pages while standing as we normally do with books.

I had to manoeuvre my way to a chair near by, put the book down on it and draw up another chair to seat my self before it. In this roughly comfortable position I was able to turn over its pages when another problem confronted me. This time it was the rich glazed paper of the printed book.

When the light falls on it the glazed paper reflects it back to your eyes blurring your vision. I was wondering why publishers go to this extent to glorify their grandiose publications without considering, as we say now, consumer reactions. I got the book weighed and found it to be five kilos. That's a bit much, I thought, for a book that you cannot even cradle on your lap while reading, nor can you take it to bed with you mistaking it to be a good bedfellow.

This incident took my mind back to my childhood days when my mother, a keen Buddhist, had bought a single volume copy of the Pansiya Panas Jatakaya. I don't think it was even a fifth so heavy as the Twentieth Century Impressions.

Yet my mother had the presence of mind to get a carpenter to do for her a small foldable wooden structure to cradle the book while sitting on the floor. My introduction to the many previous lives of the Buddha came on those days (mostly poya) when she read out those stories for me. But to read this five-kilo super book I had to adopt a position that nearly broke my back With all these limitations, I managed to get a few details.

I was able to make only a brief glance at its contents. The writers contributing to it were from the top of our intellectual society around the turn of the last century. There was C.M.Fernando, a Cambridge scholar and a Master of Laws who was styled as the 'Crown Counsel for the Island,' E. W. Perera, another legal luminary and a pioneer hero of our Independence, Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam and Ananda Coomaraswamy.

C. M. Fernando introduces the reader to a patriotic resume of the history of Ceylon with a memorable quote from Emerson Tennent, which is worth quoting even today for the benefit of all Sri Lankans. Here it is "There is no island in the world, Great Britain itself not excepted, that has attracted the attention of authors in so many different countries as Ceylon.

Then and now

"There is no nation in ancient and modern times possessed of a language and a literature, the writers of which at some time made it their theme. Its aspects, its religion, its antiquities and productions have been described as well by the classic Greeks as by those of the Lower Empire; by the Romans; by the writers of China, Burma, India and Kashmir; by the geographers of Arabia and Persia; by the medieval voyagers of Italy and France; by the annalists of Portugal and Spain; by the merchant adventurers of Holland and by the travellers and topographers of Great Britain."

Another example of the publishers' art is what may be called the vertical book. The main problem here is not the weight, though I must say it weighs about a kilo or two, mostly a dimensional problem. It's a 12 x 20 inch book and poses the problem of how to pop it into a normal bookcase. May be the publishers, the Archaeological Department in association with The Cultural Triangle, never for a moment wondered how any book lover was going to house this book. Perhaps the publisher had to choose this form of the book because of its numerous pictures.

It was an art publication, as they say, and probably it had to look arty enough to proclaim itself. It did that and I must say it is in a very valuable series. Though I had indicated to my benefactor that I would like to have the Tivanka Pilimage frescoes, he had no choice since all the temple fresco publications, thirty of them, had been snapped up by the tourists, leaving only one - the little known Danagirigala temple frescos.

In contrast to all these giant publications I have also a teeny weeny replica [5 x 3.5 ins] of a presentation made by the Dutch to King Kirti Sri Rajasingha when they were doing their best to win over our Kings. Of the many presents given to our Kings by the Dutch, besides camels and dogs of rare breed, at least one Governor got the idea of presenting a dainty handbook on Buddhist *gaathas*, similar to the missal Christians use, for the sole use of the King. The Dutch were of course merchants not missionaries.

Sri Lankan origin

The book was designed and created by Sinhala artists. It had a leather bound cover and the entire contents were hand written in Sinhala with a non-fading ink prepared according to a local formula and the writing looking as fresh today as when written first. An attractively made Manjula, a presentation box, containing the book completed the artistic touch of the Sinhala craftsmen.

Another magnificent production with profuse illustrations, with a page to a verse of the 400 verses of the Dhammapada, is a presentation copy freely distributed, in keeping with the saying of the Buddha that the gift of Dhamma exceeds all other gifts.

No effort or money has been spared to enrich this gift and whatever drawbacks it may have by way of weight is compensated by the number of quotes from all over the world substantiating the Buddha's Dhamma. Here's J. Robert Oppenheimer on the Buddha: "If we ask, for instance, whether the position of the electron remains the same, we must say 'no'; if we ask, for instance, if the electron's position changes with time, we must say 'no'; if we ask whether it is in motion, we must say 'no'.

The Buddha has given such answers when interrogated as to the condition of a man's self after his death; but they are not familiar answers to the tradition of seventeenth and eighteenth century science."

Having said that I should also like to point to the writing on the wall for books in general and for publishers in particular, which indicates that books and printing may not go on forever in the same form.

Already there is evidence that paperless books - if you can visualise them, are already showing their paces. In the near future booksellers and bookshops may all disappear. For such is the electronic world of tomorrow shaping up that we may even be using a new terminology which may be very hard to learn for those of us who have no computer literacy.

Right now it is possible to down load from some web sites a range of ebooks direct to your computer's hard disk. But the future of the portable paperless ebook is only a step or two away. All that is required for it now is a hand held device to which you can download any text from the Internet.

This is still in an experimental stage and may soon become a reality when the cost of production of these electronic devices comes within our reach.

That may put an end perhaps to the back-breaking job of removing and reading those extra heavy weights in books I have been talking about.