Various Books - a collection of 4,500 speculative books

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#1

a collection of 4,500 speculative books generated and stored on chain. Each book is an ERC-721 non-fungible token (NFT) containing attributes of varying rarity, open for speculation and interpretation.

Fully onchain as SVGs

From the FAQ:

The number of books is designed to cover a broad range of categories and attributes. The inspiration for the particular supply of 4,500 is derived from the sum of each of the Dewey Decimal Classification indices: 000 (Generalities) + 100 (Philosophy & Psychology) + 200 (Religion) + 300 (Social Sciences) + 400 (Language) + 500 (Pure Science) + 600 (Technology) + 700 (The Arts) + 800 (Literature & Rhetoric) + 900 (History & Geography) = 4,500 Various Books.

There are an additional 100 books reserved for our archives, project contributors, and future donations. This brings the theoretical size of the collection to 4,600, but we wanted exactly 4,500 publicly mintable books.

:books: BOOKS?

The “books” are intended to be collectible pieces in their own right. Each Various Book is also a seed of speculative fiction, perhaps serving as a basis for extended logic and future projects.

via @depatchedmode

#2

At first I thought they’d managed to get actual classics on chain somehow, turns out it’s just a generated title and cover according to theme. Cool project and well executed. They’ve minted nearly 60 ETH worth of Various Books too.

It would be cool to archive a lot of the classic works on-chain or in long term storage. The Long Now in San Francisco a couple years back had a similar idea they were building in physical form.

On the on-chain generative front, I did something similar recently on Rinkeby. Generates a puzzle and dices up the pieces as nfts.

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#3

I saw those, I think you posted some screencaps to Twitter. I liked the colour and the shapes.

These Origami is what I was thinking:

Oh wait you’ve got a bunch more recent ones:

Very cool!

Can’t hurt to go on like screensaver.world and just post / mint a couple as examples https://www.screensaver.world/

@depatchedmode does lots of generative art and has made a fair amount over on Tezos / HicEtNunc that he turns back into buying other people’s art. It’s fun!

@depatchedmode I think that SSW is a good default on Polygon? Other ETH-based suggestions to pick as home base?

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#4

I’d also check out https://showtime.io/ on Polygon. I don’t know if it is used all that much, but it’s the one other marketplace that I know of.

Really interested to see what happens with Versum, on the Tezos blockchain though. I think they will allow minting of collections. Not sure if anyone is doing on-chain generated at mint assets on Tezos yet, though.

That category (ArtBlocks style) is definitely becoming more and more interesting to me over time.

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