It started as a joke between cartoonist Zach Weinersmith and designer Katie Sekelsky. Wienersmith commented about being “so bookish, my bookmarks are smaller books’ and from there they got to the t-shirt design below.
Luckily, they weren’t done yet. What if the could make a bookmark that is also a book?
And they did – using 1.29pt font! Weinersmith says, “you can make out names like Bernardo and Hamlet with the naked eye and read the whole thing with a 10x magnifying glass. “Our assumption is that people are doing this for the charm of having the whole thing right there, rather than for convenience.”
In his story on the project over at Wired Tim Maly says:
there’s something very cool about seeing the collision of two kinds of book technology. The first books were scrolls (a tradition carried on today in sacred texts like the Torah); in time, the codex supplanted the scroll to the point that most people think of books as being synonymous with bound pages. With the Hamlet Bookmark, a scroll is relegated to being asked to mark your place in the codex.
Ironically, the same digital tech that made the Hamlet Bookmark possible is changing our conception of books again, as we watch texts become transmogrified into variably formatted e-books and scrolling webpages
Welcome to the wild west.