When Chuck Reuben made his first NFT recently, it wasn't to make a fast buck. And now, with about five days left in the the auction, the first bid has come in for .001 ETH ($2.45)  

Click this sentence to view The Printer's Devil, The NFT, as it appears on The Blockchain. Please allow some time for the file  to load on your device. This is a BIG file!

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, made headlines in March when Beeple sold a digital collage of images for $69 million.

Click this sentence to view the OpenSea marketplace, where The Printer's Devil NFT was minted and was recently put on auction!

"I saw the NFT as a new way of re-imagining the Art of the Book," said the 64-year-old Albuquerque resident. "This format helped me to finally complete a 45-year-old project."

Reuben, a staff member at The University of New Mexico, has served as a webmaster and editor for the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering since 1995.

Prior to that, Reuben worked as a Journeyman Printer for small print shops and newspapers like the Albuquerque Journal, The Santa Fe Reporter and the LA Weekly.

Reuben entered the newspaper profession with no experience or education.

"The publishers just took a liking to me and I was expected to learn on-the-job: I usually worked the backshop, setting type or pasting up pages on blue or red grid sheets."

Reuben said it was tedius work but there were a few perks. "At the Santa Fe Reporter they stocked the Coke machine with beer and they let me bring my dog to work. The editors also taught me how to write a good story and many of my stories appeared in print," he said.

The advent of the portable computer opened the door to many creative possibilites for Reuben and one day he wondered, "Wouldn't it be cool to write a book whose words fell into the form of human silhouettes?"

Reuben purchased his first home computer in 1986: 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, he created the 15 silhouettes that make up The Printer's Devil.

Silhouettes from the 1700s and 1800s inspired Reuben, and he saved his silhouettes in the popular (at that time) 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 in an 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 his most ardent followers.

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

This version was easy to read and caught the attention of Ripley's Believe It or Not, who featured Reuben's work in one of their syndicated cartoons. Feeling that he had gotten his 15 minutes of fame, he stored the soon-to-be unreadable computer disketts in his shed and forgot about them.

In 2019 while spring cleaning, Reuben found the diskettes again, predictability unreadable in their obsolete format. So he had to buy a diskette reader just to open the files that were stored on 2 1/2-inch diskettes.

Adobe Corp, with whom he had a strong relationship, helped Reuben crack the files open and read them and turn the postscript files directly into much friendlier PDF files. He was pleased by the beauty of the work and the way he could zoom in on the type to an infinite degree. And he no longer had to relie on the old film galleys: He could work with the original files.

The NFT craze excited Reuben because this format held the promise of sharing his novella in an entirely different 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 he demanded from type.

"This NFT is like etching The Printer's Devil on the head of a pin. It's all there to either read or admire from a distance. 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.

"I wrote this novella in 1975 after reading Hermann Hesse's "Narcissus and Goldmund" and Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice," said Reuben. "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."

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

You can read the Printer's Devils in a more conventional electronic format (as a pdf) by clicking this sentence.