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!)