A Denver artist’s super-tiny book is headed for the moon
Evan Lorenzen created a 1-centimer book full images and text to join a lunar "gallery" that will launch later this year.
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Evan Lorenzen only made two copies of his latest book.
One was created as a demonstration copy to help explain the process of making a 1-centimeter-square book by hand. The other will travel 283,900 miles to the moon.
“The tension between such a tiny thing, that I literally could have lost if I sneezed and watched it fly across the room, and the vastness of space is just mind-boggling to me,” said Lorenzen, a Lakewood painter and bookbinder who makes detailed drawings that could fit on a bottlecap.
Lorenzen prides himself on not using magnifying instruments for his art. His website (artandsuchevan.com) and Instagram account show off full-color cat portraits smaller than a stamp, spiky ceramic mugs, and fake signs for, say, Ladybug Realty or his Venus flytrap’s “no-fly zone.”
But those look chunky compared to his latest project with Moon Gallery, an international art collective that reached out to him to create a tiny book as part of a 100-piece “installation” scheduled to fly to the moon no later than 2026.
“In a small, petri-dish-like gallery, we are planting the cultural seeds of an interplanetary society,” Moon Gallery’s website reads. “What ideas do we want to take with us to the future, and what do we want to leave behind?”
A small, handbound hardcover book, of course.
“I decided to make the copy they’re showing to the press a few millimeters bigger, just for the ease of trying to turn the pages,” Lorenzen said with a laugh, adding that his book contains images and texts culled from nearly 60 international submissions. Some are poetry and literature in Russian or Arabic. Some are photographs and illustrations, including one of Lorenzen’s own of the moon smiling at an approaching rocket.
The book and its accompanying “gallery” are extra-small due to the cost of sending objects into space, which is about $100,000 per pound for a moon trip. Reducing it to ounces cuts those costs significantly while making room for scientific gear.
The 1-cubic-centimeter, 80-page book, titled “Moon Bound,” came together in a flash. Amsterdam-based Moon Gallery reached out to Lorenzen in mid-February after learning they could include a tiny payload on the outside of a lunar lander that’s taking off in the next few months.
They’d heard about Lorenzen’s skills from Domestica, an online education site where he taught a bookbinding class a couple of years back. At first, he thought their email was a scam and didn’t reply.
But he soon realized its legitimacy, having looked up Moon Gallery’s lunar prototype — a 64-object collection sent to the International Space Station in 2022 in order to study the effects of weightlessness on sculptures and other works. (One was a water-based sculpture that could only work in zero-gravity.) The lunar project was in collaboration with LifeShip, which lets people pay to send personal DNA samples to the moon — itself slated for inclusion on three upcoming lunar landers, according to the company’s website.
“I was completely shocked when I realized it was all real,” he said. “And that they wanted it by April.”
That kicked him into a flurry of research for different types of archival paper, printers and ink that could handle a book of this size. It would require double-sided printing and a higher degree of detail than he’d ever achieved with hand-drawn illustrations. The submission period ended in mid-March, giving him weeks to put the book together by its April 1 deadline. He found a typo on the Epson P700-printed pages during a copy edit, forcing him to start from scratch and make both copies again in a few days.
Lorenzen doesn’t have a scale sensitive enough to weigh the book, but he guesses that this object containing the work of dozens of people is less than a gram — or about the weight of a dollar bill.
“The images are clearly legible, but you can’t really read the 2 to 3 lines of text per millimeter without 10-times magnification,” he said. “At one point, I thought I should be wearing gloves to keep things as crisp and clean and smooth as possible, but in doing so, you miss some of the utility in your hands. The only piece of equipment I had to buy was a new printer that was more precise than anything I’d ever seen.”
The point of the book was its handcrafted nature, Moon Gallery told him. (Officials there had not responded to a Denver Post request for comment as of press time.) Once the images and text were printed from bitmap files, Lorenzen went to work sewing the binding with ultra-thin thread, but at first he couldn’t find a needle small enough for the job. He cut off the tip of a super-thin sewing needle and mounted it to a small vice grip instead. But generally, he found that using fewer tools made the process easier.
He’s not the first artist or bookmaker to have sent cultural objects to the moon. In 1969, five artists sent up a ceramic tile dubbed the “Moon Museum” with drawings on it, including from Andy Warhol, heralding sculptures and digital collections that have continued to arrive at odd intervals since the early 1970s. Buzz Aldrin, the second human to step on the moon more than 50 years ago, brought a credit card-sized book called “The Autobiography of Robert Hutchings Goddard, Father of the Space Age” with him on Apollo 11, according to The Boston Globe.
But even if there’s technically been books and art on the moon since then, Moon Gallery’s latest project reinforces the importance of physical objects that can withstand, say, a demagnetizing solar flare better than a pea-sized hard drive would, Lorenzen said.
The gallery is symbolic for now, given the lack of First Friday traffic expected on the lunar surface. But with multiple international trips planned for the future, and a return to crewed missions by early 2026 as part of the Artemis program, there’s a chance it won’t sit there unread forever.
“The night I got everything shipped off, I was looking at the moon and just feeling so dumbfounded and perplexed that anything I made would ever end up on any celestial body,” Lorenzen said. “Not just digital information, but this longstanding human tradition of sharing information through the printed page.”
