Hey folks, no Beady Eyed Craftster this weekend I’m afraid; the only crafty thing I’ve had time to do is assemble flat pack furniture. But I did want to share a new picture – see left, and click through for a big version.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: who publishes books that large? I mean, you can request large print books in a library, but I imagine they’re smaller than a double decker bus.

Well, the answer is that these specialist editions are printed by the undersea creatures themselves. What happens is this: whenever a ship is wrecked, the marine creatures nab the nameplate off the sunken vessel. Each nameplates is cut into its component letters, so “TITANIC” gave them two T’s, two I’s and an A, N and C for their printing press. This is why see kraken and such-like monsters something drag ships to their doom (PSA: just chuck the nameplates overboard and they’ll leave you alone).

Once they’ve assembled a couple of complete alphabets, it’s simply a matter of plenty of squid ink and kelp paper.

As to the texts themselves, well the undersea presses usually stick to public domain works (in this case “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”) because (a) they don’t wish to be raided by copyright enforcing scuba divers, and (b) the world of undersea authoring (books like “Moby Dick: My Side of the Story” and, of course, “50 Shades of Manta Ray”) is still in its infancy.

Of course, what they really need is a colossal sized eReader (Kickstarter ahoy!)