The Binary Book series was originally conceived as a three volume set of three-dimensional prints by the artist Justin Gohde. Each volume is a binary translation of a literary classic and available as both a hand-signed individually numbered print (edition of 500) and an unlimited second edition.

First conceiving of the binary book series in 2005, artist Justin Gohde took four years to create the series of books. Painstakingly encoding each individual letter into eight binary digits, his modern translations of such classics as “War of the Worlds,” “Romeo and Juliet,” and “Genesis” employ the same ASCII subset of international Unicode standards as most keyboards.

He explains, “I wanted to make a book that can’t be read, so much as interpreted… ” Justin focuses upon symbols, ideal forms, and approximations of space. "Here's one of my favorite quotes, " says Justin Gohde, “ 'You can tell the beginning of a new age by the way people start retelling old stories in a different way'.... I wanted manifest an opposite, to create a book that is explicitly intended to be not read. I like to provoke conversation and communication of ideas... ...the ideal of the story is more imporant than the symbols on the page."


The Binary Book series:

• The War of the Worlds
• Genesis
• Romeo and Juliet