This book can be read only when it’s wet

Over the past three months, in a small print shop in Toronto, a group of people has been hard at work making the impossible possible: a book that can be read only when you pour water over it.

The “Dehydrating Book” is the first of its kind. It was printed with a special hydrochromic ink that is invisible to the naked eye and becomes visible only when it’s wet. It is 100% waterproof and ships in a pouch full of water.

Why? To raise awareness about the global water crisis.

The project is a close collaboration between Water for People, a global nonprofit that helps bring clean water and sanitation systems to underserved communities around the world; communications firm Edelman; and Toronto-based graphic arts studio the Gas Company.

Water for People and Edelman came up with the concept. And after three months of iteration (and many sleepless nights) the Gas Company made it a reality by crafting a whopping 130 waterproof books. One of them could be yours free—if you subscribe to the Water for People newsletter and win the raffle that will ensue.

The water crisis, made tangible

“This book needs water. Just like millions of children in Latin America.” This is the opening line on Water for People’s website, and the sentiment behind it is literal.

According to a UNICEF 2021 study, more than 1.42 billion people—including 450 million children—don’t have enough water to meet their everyday needs. That is one in five children worldwide whose ability to focus, learn, and achieve their potential is hampered by illnesses and decreased cognitive performance caused by a lack of clean drinking water.

Water quality issues are so difficult to detect and monitor that the World Bank has called it “the invisible crisis.” By making a “dehydrating book,” the team wanted to make the crisis visible: When water disappears, so do opportunities like education. “The Dehydrating Book is symbolic of the current realities and obstacles of communities in Latin America,” says Mark Duey, Water for People’s CEO. “The region is currently facing a water crisis that’s holding children back.”

But no such book had ever been made before.

The making of a waterproof book

Doug Laxdal founded the Gas Company in 1996. Since then, he has built a strong reputation for “kookie projects,” as he puts it. In 2022, his team made a completely fireproof version of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale to raise awareness of book burnings and bans in the U.S. (The Unburnable Book fetched $130,000 at a Sotheby’s auction, and all proceeds went to PEN America.)

Laxdal recalls that when he was first asked to make an “unburnable” book, he knew exactly what to do. This time around, he wasn’t so sure. “A waterproof book is like putting metal in a microwave,” he told me on a recent video call. “You just don’t it.” After he hung up with Edelman, his only thought was: What the hell am I going to do?

If you google “waterproof books” you’ll find a smattering of options, from plasticky baby books to “all-weather” notebooks, but the Dehydrating Book proved to be a whole other ball game. It had to be waterproof, and the ink had to stick to the page without washing away, and the text had to appear only when you poured water over it.

A game of trial and error

First on Laxdal’s to-do list was the book cover. His first instinct was to utilize plastic, but the four plastic manufacturers he reached out to weren’t interested in the project. In the end, he landed on white acrylic, also known as plexiglass, which comes in a gloss finish but in this case was sanded down to a matte surface using an orbital sander. The cover closes around the pages of the book almost like a jewelry box.

Then came the pages. Laxdal experimented with a flurry of materials, including Tyvek (a type of synthetic material that’s often used to wrap buildings during construction) and polyester. The former wrinkled under water, the latter made the pages too stiff. Other options simply weren’t suitable for the kind of ink he had to use. Various test runs using pouches filled with water for a few days yielded unworkable results: Some ink either bled into the water or turned sticky, effectively gluing the book shut.

The final version is made with a synthetic paper called SuperYupo (regular Yupo wasn’t good enough). The book covers are acrylic. The outside is lined with another sheet of SuperYupo that is glued to the covers using a waterproof adhesive from 3M. The pages are sewn with standard polyester thread.

Laxdal’s team printed the first layer of text with a UV litho press, which uses ultraviolet light to instantly cure the ink onto the page. Laxdal likens the process to UV-cured gel nail polish, except in this case, the UV machine is almost 100 feet long. Then, they used a silkscreen press to apply enough layers of hydrochromic ink to conceal the text printed underneath. Finally, they placed the book inside a plastic pouch and dunked it in a small aquarium so the water could flow inside the pouch before it was sealed.

In a live demo on Zoom, I watched as graphic designer Layla Laxdal (Doug’s daughter) poured a glass of water over an open book, and instantly, a brightly colored hummingbird appeared on the page.

The story, cowritten with students from Palmira, a village in Peru’s Cascas Valley, follows a group of animals, led by a thirsty hummingbird named Lupita, who travel through Peru in search of water. A spokesperson from Edelman explains that the message behind the book is “el agua es vida,” (or “water is life”): “It’s a motto that the community lives by, and it is a powerful reminder for us readers that without water, children can’t thrive.”

By the end of my interview with Laxdal, some 40 minutes later, the image that came into view during the demo had started to fade, apart from one patch in the center where the water had pooled. That patch was still bright.