A limited edition of the world’s longest single-volume book of the popular manga series, One Piece, has now gone on sale, Independent reports.
According to the report, with 21,450 pages, the book is physically impossible to read as it was created with the intention of highlighting how comics now serve as commodities, it’s more of a sculpture than a book.
Priced at €1,900, the sculpture, titled One Piece, is being sold by Ilan Manouach, the multidisciplinary artist who designed it after Eiichiro Oda’s original comics, which were published weekly in the Japanese magazine Shōnen Jump beginning in 1997.
After printing out the digital Japanese edition of One Piece, Manouach bound it together, treating it not as a book but as “sculpture material”, according to the book/ artwork’s French publisher JBE.
One Piece 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,” a JBE spokesperson told The Guardian.
“Ilan Manouach’s One Piece proposes to shift the understanding of digital comics from a qualitative examination of the formal possibilities of digital comics to a quantitative reappraisal of ‘comics as Big Data’,” they added.
Following its release on 7 September, the 50 copies of its limited edition run sold out within days.
