The Printer's Devil is a 40,000-word coming-of-age novella whose sentences take the shape of 15 human silhouettes. The best place to view this piece, and to read it, is to view it directly on the OpenSea's Ethereum Blockchain Give it about 20 seconds to load, then use your mouse to click on the place you'd like to begin reading.

The story is set in Highland Park in the '80s, 20 miles north of Chicago.

The Printer's Devil was featured in a Ripley's Ripley's Believe It or Not.

Legend has it that these silhouettes were found on a flash drive in a pair of blue jean cut-offs at Thrift Town in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The 18-year-old author recounts his journey from the ivory tower of a suburban high school to the mind-numbing bindery of a local weekly newspaper.

Nothing is taboo as Kip and his friend Antonio explore the contours of friendship, sexuality, and drugs in a teenage wasteland.

Originally published as a 16-page broadsheet newspaper in 1993, The Printer's Devil returns as a one-off, high-resolution PNG file, certified by Verisart. In this format, the entire novella can be viewed as an intriguing visual work of art....or read as a spirited memoir.

This one-of-a-kind, high-resolution digital work was 45 years in the making. You can now own it, both literally and figuratively, as a single PNG file. You can also save this file (download it) and view it in your favorite digital viewer (Photoshop will work) and see its remarkable detail.

Read the entire text of The Printer's Devil as it appeared in its newspaper version by clicking this link. Learn about the creation of The Printer's Devil by clicking this link.

Artist's Statement:

The Printer's Devil is a project that has preoccupied me for the last 46 years. I wrote this novella in 1975 after reading Hermann Hesse's "Narcissus and Goldmund" and Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice."

As I grew older and more circumspect, I realized that the novella's subject of impossible love could be troubling to certain readers, so I put the typewritten manuscript away and forgot about it.

Fast forward to 1986. I purchased my first home computer: a 16-bit desktop computer driven by an Intel 8086 microprocessor running at 7.14 MHz. Combined with a hand-held scanner, Adobe PageMaker 1.0, and an abundance of free time, I created the 15 silhouettes that make up The Printer's Devil.

Silhouettes from the 1700s and 1800s inspired me, and I saved the work as popular postscript files, outputting the shapes on Kodak film at 600 pixels per inch.

The first edition of The Printer's Devil took the form of a saddled stitched booklet, measuring 8-1/2x11 inches, with a white linen cover, edition of 1000. It was a handsome offset job, but the type (about 6 pt) was so small it was almost impossible to read by even my most ardent followers

The second version of The Printer's Devil rolled off the press in 1993, using those same Kodak film galleys. It was a true celebration of the possibilities inherent in the medium as 5,000 were printed on newsprint on an actual newspaper press in an oversized 16-page broadsheet format.

This version was easy enough to read and caught the attention of Ripley's Believe It or Not, who featured me in one of their syndicated cartoons. All this attention satiated my creative impulses, so I stored the soon-to-be unreadable computer disks in my shed and forgot about them. In 2019, however, while I was cleaning, I found the silhouettes again, predictability unreadable in their obsolete format.

Adobe Corp helped me crack the files open and read them. It took a while, but they figured out an easy way to turn the postscript files directly into PDF files. I was pleased by the beauty of the work and the way I could zoom in on the type to an infinite degree.

The NFT craze excited me because this format held the promise of sharing the novella in an entirely novel way. The 15 pages of the novella fell naturally into a 4x4 matrix, and the resolution, and at 2200 pixels per inch, delivered the kind of sharpness that one expects in type. To me, this NFT is like etching The Printer's Devil on the head of a pin. It's all there to either read or stare at blankly. You don't even have to turn the pages!

And the story of The Printer's Devil resonates even more today. Its message of love is as timeless as love itself, as are the enchanting silhouettes that convey it.

This is certain to be a wise investment for those who are searching for something meaningful and beautiful.

The winner of this auction (the person who meets the reserve) will receive 25 free copies of the 16-page broadsheet version of The Printer's Devil, printed on a real newspaper press!