Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Himalayan Kingdom collects color photographs culled from 40,000 pictures taken over four trips to the Asian enclave by a group of MIT students under the tutelage of director of special projects Michael Hawley, plus several Bhutanese friends of the expedition. Those images, printed in giant format on one side of five-by-100-foot rolls of archival paper, make up the contents of the world’s largest book. Cover closed, the six-inch-thick volume measures five by three-and-a-half feet; it weighs about 130 pounds, and is printed and bound on-demand in a limited edition of 500 copies available only through Amazon.com. The book costs $10,000, takes 1-2 months for delivery, and qualifies for Super Saver Shipping. It comes with an aluminum easel for easier viewing and turning of pages, and a charitable-donation tax deduction.
It’s hard to assess this object in any but physical terms. For one thing, I’m not sure what it really is. Is it an album of bound posters? A photographic catalogue? A high-end printed slide show of “our class trip to the Himalayas?” A 21st-century art scroll? The digital equivalent of a monastic manuscript copy? Mechanical reproduction pushed to the borders of handicraft? Or hoopla? Or what?
Undeniably, the work is expensive and rare. To find my way into its presence took a little over two months. After failing to synchronize a visit to the bindery in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and being thwarted in my efforts to view the copy on display at the National Geographic Society’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., I finally caught up with Number 14 of 500, one week after it was transferred from National Geographic to a permanent home at the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress.
My appointment to look at Bhutan also gave the Prints and Photography Division staff their first opportunity to go through the book. They pushed several library tables together against an outside wall of the reading room to make a raised platform for turning the pages. The book was cradled by foam bolsters to ease pressure on the spine when it lay open. A step-stool helped elevate me above the viewing surface, although probably not far enough to attain the right aesthetic distance from the page. The custom easel hadn’t been unpacked yet. The blinds were drawn to cut down glare. I borrowed a loupe, to inspect the prints’ dot structure.
Bhutan‘s binding boards are hinged and attached to each other by metal posts, which also pass through and anchor the four signatures at the spine end of the book. Each signature—the single unfolded piece of paper that passes through the printer/press—consists of one roll of archival paper five feet high and 100 feet long. The images in each signature are printed side-by-side in one long pass. The scroll is then folded every 40 inches, back or forth, so that each section of the bound volume opens spread by spread, like a long fan, rather than trimmed into separate pages like a conventional book, or rolled out like a narrative scroll. Turning the recto page pulls open the following spread.
Michael Hawley, impresario of the Bhutan project, also performs as a concert pianist. Where a concert artist can make due onstage with his own two hands and one page turner, it required two white-gloved librarians working in tandem to turn a page for this reader. Thus, the minimum number of people required to read the world’s largest book is at least a company, if not a crowd. Uniquely, Bhutan makes for a social, rather than a reflective or meditative experience. For a time, in this instance about four hours, the company of readers can become part of a privileged family looking over pictures from their treks to Shangri-la.
That community activity, leafing through Bhutan with a couple of intelligent page-turners, is a distinctly pleasant experience. We had numerous quasi-technical discussions—for example, “Do you think those colors are true?” (asked of a red, and a blue); “Do they really have such red complexions in Brokpa [no tourists allowed] or is it betel juice, or just problems with the printer?”; “What happened to the dots?” (when the dot structure of the print disappears, there’s no detail rendered from the photograph) and its follow-up question, “Is the problem in the picture or the print?”
Occasionally, the picture editors’ critique—”I think that sunlight zaps the faces of those monks in the middle ground”—gives way to tourists’ awe. “Look at that alfalfa field!” was the response to a scenic view on the road to Mongar and Jakar. An 800-year-old iron chain bridge, links with lots of air between strung across an unseen ravine, inspired dread. A caption recorded that, nearby, a yak had recently been devoured by a tiger. One librarian allowed as she would probably only use the bridge “if the tiger that ate the yak was chasing me.” Such were the intermittent joys.
Both physically and procedurally, Bhutan is difficult to read. Were this a book of art photographs, it might narrate a story-without-words, as silent movies did and cartoons and comics sometimes do. Or each picture might be a moment unto itself, arresting and revealing its subject, piercing the viewer with a recognition. Another possibility, given their size and genre—landscapes, portraits, exotic sights—would be to read these pictures as posters. But a poster incorporates language, a phrase, a tagline or title or label, terse and legible, to help it stand alone against a wall and guide the reverie. This book of stadium-scale pictures has very small captions, hard to read and, save for the yak and the tiger, minimally rewarding.
Intellectually as well as conversationally, Bhutan is most stimulating in its failures. I expect that when an effort is described as “pushing the limits of technology,” the results will show how far one can go with the tools at hand. In this case—the world’s largest book—the limiting elements were, first, the software used to process the digital and film-based images of whatever, to lay them out in pages (or rather scrolls) and to instruct the printer; and, second, the color printer itself, which applied the inks to the page. In exceedingly large-format, high-resolution printed photographs, it becomes impossible to ignore technical issues like dot structure, color balance, and relative scale that ordinarily concern only the industry professional, the graphic designer, and the (human) printer.
It’s a poor workman blames his tools, which are only labor-savers, not labor substitutes. In the production end of picture publishing, individuals are paid to exercise taste, picky obsessions, quirks and flashes. Their concern for otherwise invisible details permits the magazine reader, the catalogue flipper, the poster-gazer, the prospective tourist or art lover, to gaze upon the simulacrum and not hear the images redrawing, the inks mixing, machine noise.
Something else odd happens here. A photograph, even a bad one, captures and reveals the overlooked, the unavailable: it “takes” the object that is otherwise too small, too far, too deep, too fast, beyond the range, forbidden, or simply out of reach because it’s of the past. These pictures, however, are reproduced so large, they pass through the looking-glass. For example, one scenic photograph depicts a hill village and temple in the middle-ground. Across the valley, in the upper right and far away, stand more buildings. The naked or bespectacled eye can refocus in nature; a painter renders near and far with such clarity as his hand and eye can muster. But the photograph with its single focal point blurs the distant objects as well as those too close. In this nearly five-by-seven-foot photo spread, the camera can’t detail what the eye can perceive.
Laurance Wieder is the author most recently of Words to God’s Music: A New Book of Psalms (Eerdmans).
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