It’s an advancement in publishing that Johannes Gutenberg could hardly have fathomed.
Manual is a 26-page, 3D-printed book made of thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) from Hyperpress, a research initiative exploring 3D-printed graphic design and publishing by Darius Ou and Benson Chong. All that’s written inside the replicable book is a selection of its own G-code, or the code used to 3D print it. A 3D-printed book about how to print a 3D-printed book. How meta.
Manual is the sixth book from Hyperpress since 2021, and creating it was both “a technical exploration and a conceptual exercise to think about our discipline and the notion of print,” Ou tells Fast Company. “It has never been about mass production or proposing paradigm shifts for the publishing industry.”
Incredibly, the book is printed in a single go. There’s no postproduction or additional printing or binding needed. Some of Hyperpress’s previous projects, like last year’s On the Nature of Values, a book made from 3D-printed polymer mixed with wood pulp, used 3D printing to make pages that then had an additional layer printed on top for text and images.
Manual is printed spine-first in one piece in a process the designers call XY-for-Z printing, in which pages are printed vertically on their edges instead of flat. The technique makes double-sided printing doable, but it also improves the fidelity of small-scale text, which otherwise looks inconsistent and stringy when printed flat, as in early prototypes. It also took some experimentation to get the pages pliable enough to handle like a book.
“The biggest challenge was the flexible material, TPU, we were using to print the book,” Ou says. “Printing what are essentially thin, vertical walls in flexible materials requires a lot of testing and finessing with the print settings, as well as hardware tuning.”
Ideally, the book would have included more of its own G-code, Ou says, but there were technical limitations to how small the text could be printed and still be legible enough to read. Even so, it’s a remarkable feat that shows how far we’ve come since movable type.
