This Special Edition Of Fahrenheit 451 Can Only Be Read When It's Heated

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 tells the story of a dystopian future where books have been outlawed and are destroyed by firemen who set them ablaze. But in an ironic twist, Super Terrain, a publisher in France, has created a new edition of Bradbury's classic that actually requires extreme heat in order to be read.

GIF: Instagram

Jo Frenken shared this video to Instagram showing a prototype copy of the book, which was developed by the Charles Nypels Lab at the Netherlands-based Jan van Eyck Academie — a research institute known for its experiments in materials and media. The pages of the book appear completely blacked-out — like a redacted CIA file — as you flip through them. But when heat is applied, using a flame from a lighter, in this case, the heat-activated ink disappears and the underlying text is revealed.

Super Terrain will apparently be making this unique version of Fahrenheit 451 available sometime in 2018, but we recommend maybe grabbing a hair dryer to read it. An actual open flame is probably a bit too risky.

[Instagram via Laughing Squid]

Trending Stories Right Now
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/10/this-special-edition-offahrenheit-451-can-only-be-read-when-its-heated/
www.gizmodo.com.au
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-43
47765
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:UU4NLDEXTYWC5UXCQQ5UBZUUDGIYMGAB
<urn:uuid:a2c63ad3-6f04-4e53-a6da-e37dc0234e8e>
2018-10-20T11:00:56Z
104.16.38.51
text/html
sha1:TKLV3FIIH6RNUD7HFU2LNQJD44WKN6OE
<urn:uuid:9127496e-832d-4e25-8cfc-e8fe66a65fc2>
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/10/this-special-edition-offahrenheit-451-can-only-be-read-when-its-heated/
response
<urn:uuid:c503f070-2166-4280-974d-294e12c55368>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-43
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for October 2018
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-168-124-187.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 0.11-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/