Imagine a book about printing, made by various desktop printers from history. Printed through a chain of 4 printers representing a point in desktop printing history, each with an assigned color in the CMYK process.

What?

I know. Crazy.

Crazy-awesome.

Xavier Antin uses an array of four vintage printers to print this book. Each one prints one of the CMYK colors, then sends it through to the intake feed of the next printer in the queue. So, there are four types of technology, progressing through 100 years of history on one sheet of paper. And this happens with every page of the book. The registration of colors (or lack thereof) shows both the separation and the unity of these technologies. All of them serve the same purpose. All of them have small, convenient form factors. But the method of getting an image on paper is different for each printer. These methods include inkjet and laser printing, as well as a stencil duplicator (mimeograph) and a spirit duplicator (the ones from back in the day that made grade school worksheets smell good when they came off the press… Mmmm…. printing…).

Stair-stepping through history.

Just In Time, via BoingBoing