Type specimen printed in author’s blood
August 18, 2010 9:59 AM   Subscribe

Fraktur mon amour: Ruud Linssen’s Book of War, Mortification and Love is a collection of “essays on voluntary suffering” that works as a specimen of the Fakir blackletter typeface issued by merry pranksters Underware. Bored already? Well, try this on for size: It’s “printed in the author’s blood.”
posted by joeclark (10 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Use a pen, Sideshow Bob.
posted by Drastic at 10:02 AM on August 18, 2010 [6 favorites]


This is such a mind jerk, he should've used his sperm instead.
posted by Skeptic at 10:06 AM on August 18, 2010


It's 96 pages and they've made 2000 copies, or 192,000 pages. This Chemical & Engineering News article suggests it takes about 20µL of ink per page. An A5 page isn't the same size as a typical journal or magazine, but we'll call that close enough. That works out to 3.8L or just about a gallon of blood, which is quite a bit more than one person can spare at once. Assuming he parceled it out blood donation style it would take about 17 months to produce that much blood. So that at least theoretically fits within the 2 year production time frame mentioned in the link.

Or he cheated and put a token amount of blood in standard printing ink. I know which theory I find more likely.
posted by jedicus at 10:09 AM on August 18, 2010 [1 favorite]


Also, at € 24.50, this is surprisingly affordable for a limited, numbered edition, never mind one printed in such an...er...unusual medium. I smell something, and it sure ain't blood.
posted by Skeptic at 10:12 AM on August 18, 2010 [1 favorite]


Seriously? RHCP? Really? That's the most hardcore music he could find?
posted by !Jim at 10:17 AM on August 18, 2010


Also, IMHO, obtaining the volume of blood needed would be the least of the printers' worries. To keep the blood from congealing in the machine, I guess that it'd have to be dosed with blood thinners. Then, you'd have the problem of getting it to dry on the paper. Printers' ink has been developed over centuries to dry just right. Finally, after an eventually successful printing run, you'd have to clean up the whole bloody mess. And wait until the Health & Safety people hear about the idea: isn't blood classified as a biohazard?
posted by Skeptic at 10:37 AM on August 18, 2010


I remember when KISS did this same gag for their Marvel Comic.
posted by Cookiebastard at 10:49 AM on August 18, 2010


Marvel Comics´KISS comic was printed with Real KISS Blood, and (conveniently mentioned in the same article) Mark Gruenwald had his ashes mixed into a printing of Squadron Supreme after he passed on.
posted by Shepherd at 10:53 AM on August 18, 2010


There are movies on the making of the book and the ink...
posted by mfoight at 12:10 PM on August 18, 2010


There are movies on the making of the book and the ink...

OK, now I'm impressed. To put it shortly: It isn't actually printed in blood (as I guessed, there are a few technical problems with that), but neither is this a KISS-style "drop of blood in a sea of ink" stunt. The oil-based ink actually uses freeze-dried blood as pigment. That's damn clever.
posted by Skeptic at 12:55 PM on August 18, 2010


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