Artist Creates 1-Centimeter Book for Moon’s First Art Gallery (Exclusive)

A Colorado illustrator and bookmaker who is known for creating detailed miniature pieces as small as a postage stamp truly outdid himself with his latest project: a 1-centimeter book that will head to the moon.

“This is probably my favorite miniature work that I’ve done,” Evan Lorenzen, 34, tells PEOPLE of the 80-page book he assembled by hand titled Moon Bound. “To be able to work on something so detailed, but have it be such a collaborative effort as well, I think was really rewarding.”

The project originated with the Moon Gallery, a collective based in the Netherlands that is curating an “art gallery” of 100 works to land on the moon no later than 2026.

“The Moon Gallery aims to set up a cultural base on the Moon as an essential puzzle piece of a first lunar human settlement,” reads a message on the collective’s website.

The group contacted Lorenzen this past February after coming across his online course on miniature bookmaking and asked if he was interested in creating a tiny book that would end up on the moon.

At first, Lorenzen thought Moon Gallery’s email inquiry was a joke, but he then “looked them up and it was very much a real project.”

With an April deadline to meet, Lorenzen soon realized how much of an endeavor it would be to assemble the book. In particular, everything had to fit under 1-centimeter cubed, as sending a 1-pound object to and from the moon costs about $100,000.

“Everything is so precision-based when it comes to space exploration,” he says, “and there’s a lot of science and huge teams of people putting this all together. So everything really does have to be as exact as possible.”

Moon Bound contains text and images submitted by over 40 contributors about Earth’s only natural satellite.

“It’s a great range of pieces of poetry and writing and photos and paintings,” Lorenzen says, “and it’s really a wide swath with multiple languages involved. The main nucleus of it all is the concept of ‘How does the moon view the earth?’ “

After digitally receiving submissions for the book’s content from the Moon Gallery, Lorenzen determined that the paper stock would have to be high quality and long lasting to handle the moon’s atmosphere. He also had to find a printing technique small enough to capture detail both in the text and images. 

“It was a lot of juggling of different materials,” he says. “Eventually I found a type of printer that gave us that precision that we really needed while also having archival ink that’s rated to last two to 400 years. That was another thing to think about was the longevity of this book and making sure that that information really lasts.”

Lorenzen says that it took 20 minutes to print just one side of one piece of paper due to the high quality resolution of the printer.

“The amount of time it took for printing was quite a while,” he says, “but luckily we found the right combination of materials and were able to make it work.”

After the pages were formatted and printed, Lorenzen stitched them by hand. He found a very thin needle that was under 1 millimeter, but he still had to grind it down to make it smaller. 

While stitching with his fingers was a slow process, “it made things more crisp and precise and gave us a better looking product overall,” he says.

Meeting his deadline, Lorenzen submitted the final version of Mood Bound — which measured 9.9 millimeters wide by 9.6 millimeters tall and 7.4 millimeters thick — to the Moon Gallery, which is working in conjunction with the California-based space mission company LifeShip.

According to Lorenzen, Moon Bound will be encased with other objects in a resin pyramid attached to a lunar rover that will travel the moon’s surface.

He says they’re currently on schedule “to hopefully have everything launched by the end of the year.”

Lorenzen’s interest in miniature art stems from his frustration with not being able to finish incredibly detailed normal-sized illustrations before abandoning them.

“Then one day,” he recalls, “I thought, ‘What if I shifted my scale and started doing these pieces of art in miniature so I can actually get something done in a single sitting?’ I made a tiny little sketchbook from some paper I had sitting around and started doodling in it and really enjoyed it because I could still have that level of precision, but not something overwhelming like a large piece of paper.”

Although he used a jeweler’s loupe magnifier for the Moon Bound project to make sure everything printed correctly and clearly, Lorenzen prides himself in avoiding magnification tools when creating his miniatures.

“I just do everything by eye,” he says. “That process has been really interesting because when I first started, I’d have to lay on my stomach on the floor to get stable enough to actually do it. And now I’ve just developed those kind of fine motor muscles in my hands that allow me to sit there and go dot by dot.”

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He feels grateful to the Moon Gallery for contacting him for the book project.

“I think they made the right decision of using the format of a book,” he says, ”because it really does allow us to have a lot of visual and cultural information just condensed into one small distinct object that really is so representative of humanity.”