Miami Student

Issue date: 8/31/07 Section: Campus

An average physics book is 11 inches wide, 9 inches tall and weighs about 3 to 4 pounds. King Library's newest addition to its book collection is just a tad bit larger.

Miami University unveiled a copy Aug. 15 of the largest published book in the world-Bhutan:  A Visual Odyssey Across the Last Himalayan Kingdom, by Michael Hawley.

Measuring 5 feet wide and 7 feet tall when opened, the book weighs a total of 133 pounds.

As one of 500 large copies, the giant book now resides in Miami's special collections, located on the third floor of King Library.

Each Monday morning at 9:30 a.m., one page of the book is turned by the staff of special collections.

There is also a coffee table version of the book nearby, so that students can, as Janet Stuckey, head of special collections at King Library, said, "turn through the pages of the coffee book and come back to see (the bigger version) turned to that page."

In 1998, Hawley, director of special projects at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, visited Bhutan, a small country located between India and China in Southeast Asia with students and staff from MIT, taking more than 60,000 pictures during their journey. Each page of the book shows a picture from the expedition to Bhutan with a short description.

Hawley and his team chose to capture daily life through two Bhutanese children, Choki Lhamo and Gyelsey Loday, as well as documenting the landscape and architecture throughout the country.

The team then approached Acme Bookbinding, a company based in Charlestown, Mass., that specializes in creating large books. It would take two days to make the one book.

"The book is basically one piece of paper 400 feet long, folded like an accordion," Stuckey said. "Each page is carefully folded, and when you look closely, there is an equal white rim around every page."

Each copy of the book needed more than a gallon of ink and 24 hours of printing time.

First-year student Jessica Hare found that statistic a little mind-boggling.

"A whole day to print? A gallon of ink? That has to be a large book," Hare said. "I cannot wait to get to see it."

Stuckey said everything in Miami's special collections is acquired through private donations. No student fees or state money is used.

The book is now a permanent addition to King's collection, as a private donor bought it from Friendly Planet, a nonprofit charity formed by Hawley in 2001 to support education in developing regions.

Eventually, when all 112 pages have been turned, it will go into storage in special collections.

The university is also currently in negotiations with Hawley to visit Miami and talk about his expedition in Bhutan.

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