Books burn, but not this one.
Since August 2021, over 1,500 books have been banned from U.S. school districts, most of them focused on people of color and LGBTQ individuals. To raise awareness of the growing number of book burnings and bans in this country, Penguin Random House has partnered with legendary author Margaret Atwood to create a single, fireproof edition of her dystopian novel (and often banned) The Handmaid’s Tale. “The Unburnable Book” was sewn and bound by hand and made from a variety of fireproof materials that were put to the test with a torch, even left in a burning BBQ for half an hour. As stunts go, it’s a pretty incendiary one.
The book’s star material is something called Cinefoil. When Laxdal picks up a sheet of it to show me over FaceTime, I can hear it crumple like kitchen foil. That’s because it consists of an ultra-thin aluminum sheet sandwiched between a high temperature-rated coating.
Unsurprisingly, every other material in the book has metal in it, too: The hard cover is made of Phenolic, a rigid kind of resin you’d see if you dismantled a stereo, says Laxdal. The head and tail bands—a detail often used at the top and bottom of a spine in quality hardcover books—are made of really fine, woven stainless-steel thread. And the whole thing is bound together with nickel wire, like the kind you might use to make jewelry. Because of all the metal, Laxdal says the book is “considerably heavier” than a regular book and comes in at about three pounds.
The book was completed about two weeks ago and is now being auctioned online by Sotheby’s New York. At the time of this writing, the bid is at $70,000, but you have until June 7 to put in a bid; all proceeds will go to PEN America. Laxdal didn’t reveal how much it cost his company to make, though he did mention “it was not inexpensive.”
And no wonder: “It’s a completely handmade Handmaid’s Tale,” he says.